AMD to start Bulldozer AM3+ production by March 2011, launch in April 2011

[nn_step]

Spec* numbers are not lies. They're quite accurate for the workloads they benchmark.

Correction, All benchmarks are only approximations based on several assumptions.

To date, there is yet to be one valid benchmark on predicting user experience improvement.

A benchmark that is good at predicting performance at some tasks are often terrible at predicting performance for other tasks. [Numeric analysis often requires features and additions that are considerably expensive in terms of transistors. That would negatively effect all other scientific calculations.]

[DarthShader]

The difference is, AMD has no competing parts for that market segment from own camp, contrary to Zambezi which will compete with Intel solutions as well as AMD's own lower grade solutions for desktop market.
That's why AMD let Brazos platform to be reviewed ahead of market availability.

I did acknowledge that two posts above the one you quoted.

brazos is OEM only, they don't ship the chips directly to end-users and they can't disturb their own sales with it because they aren't present in that market

That's a solid logic I can't argue with.

But in the end, what effectively happened is, we got perf numbers before launch, since as far as I understand AMD still keeps their hand on the launch date, which is tomorrow, or so I heard. If it was up to the OEMs we'd surely see some products launch before Xmas and some reviews, right?

Makes me wonder why Intel let some benchamrks before launch be done and canibalize (or not?) it's own sales...

[Manicdan]

Makes me wonder why Intel let some benchamrks before launch be done and canibalize (or not?) it's own sales...

didnt we see a 10% price drop back in nov/oct for i7 right around the same time SB was being leaked?

[tbone8ty]

do you think will see bulldozer engineering samples at CES?

[JF-AMD]

no, CES is all about bobcat, not bulldozer

[freeloader]

no, CES is all about bobcat, not bulldozer

Hehehehe....I'd be surprised if anyone even saw BD behind closed doors at CES.

[richierich]

Crazy how it's now officially 2011, Sandy Bridge is going to be released and BD hopefully in a few months. Wow. BD better come out swinging, because if Intel's 2500K & 2600K trade blows with the 980x, imagine what their higher-end 2011 processors will do. At this point it would be kind of stupid to buy 1156, 1366, AM3 processors if you are building a new system based around a $200-$300 CPU.

[kuroikenshi]

no, CES is all about bobcat, not bulldozer

the problem is the lack of hype, or even performance information we are getting, as indicated BD is due to be released this year and yet we have very little to go by except the slides which were released months ago.

I can quantify a couple of hundred people I know have been waiting for any BD data, anything which can indicate real-time performance, and it looks like the lack of information will mean that they are going to go for intel products.

I understand that you're not the one in charge of withholding information, but at least I hope what your enthusiast and mainstream consumers will do because of it.

Is it that the bigger picture will benefit the company far more?

[JF-AMD]

I've been with the company for close to 5 years and the whole time we have released benchmarks with launch. We typically do something like a STREAM benchmark before launch, but that is only a memory bandwidth benchmark. If you look back you will see that this has been the case for quite some time.

Sandybridge is supposed to launch this week, I have not seen an official intel benchmark, have we? This is how the industry operates. We all remember Osborne, at least those of us that are old enough do.

[jeremyshaw]

I've been with the company for close to 5 years and the whole time we have released benchmarks with launch. We typically do something like a STREAM benchmark before launch, but that is only a memory bandwidth benchmark. If you look back you will see that this has been the case for quite some time.

Sandybridge is supposed to launch this week, I have not seen an official intel benchmark, have we? This is how the industry operates. We all remember Osborne, at least those of us that are old enough do.

Though I am not old enough to know personally:
IIRC, Osbone was already being outdone by other companies, and they were already late to begin with... so when they made the [now] infamous "next gen" announcement, it was simply the final nail in the coffin.

[kuroikenshi]

I've been with the company for close to 5 years and the whole time we have released benchmarks with launch. We typically do something like a STREAM benchmark before launch, but that is only a memory bandwidth benchmark. If you look back you will see that this has been the case for quite some time.

Sandybridge is supposed to launch this week, I have not seen an official intel benchmark, have we? This is how the industry operates. We all remember Osborne, at least those of us that are old enough do.

lol my first ACTUAL pc was a phlillips... all I remember the screen being green and black...
previous to that all I had was cpc's
instead of previous I should maybe say "controlled leak" for the better word

[tbone8ty]

Crazy how it's now officially 2011, Sandy Bridge is going to be released and BD hopefully in a few months. Wow. BD better come out swinging, because if Intel's 2500K & 2600K trade blows with the 980x, imagine what their higher-end 2011 processors will do. At this point it would be kind of stupid to buy 1156, 1366, AM3 processors if you are building a new system based around a $200-$300 CPU.

totally agree...power efficiency of sandybridge is impressive

[Olivon]

totally agree...power efficiency of sandybridge is impressive

Intel got margins to go to 95W TDP

edit : Sorry, Hardware.fr's gif was on my cache and deep linkin' isn't supported

[Sn0wm@n]

Intel got margins to go to 95W TDP

and you know that because ????

[kuroikenshi]

and you know that because ????

he has a job as a part-time intel cpu down at the grocery store down the road

[Russian]

Starting production in March and Launching a month later? That means they'll have ZERO problems? And they'll be rushing themselves? I don't like it one bit.

[Olivon]

and you know that because ????

I know that because I can read

Intel s’est laissé beaucoup de marge avec un TDP à 95 watts sur ces processeurs, et leur consommation réelle est une bonne surprise par rapport à leurs spécifications. Du fait de l’Hyperthreading, le Core i7 consomme notablement plus en charge que les Core i5.

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/815-...dy-bridge.html

That's crazy, isn't it ?

[kuroikenshi]

I know that because I can read



http://www.hardware.fr/articles/815-...dy-bridge.html

That's crazy, isn't it ?

you mean you can read.... french

[Olivon]

you mean you can read.... french

I edited, sorry

[Mats]

Moreover though I want AM3+ mobos available some time before BD so I can get my system prepared to just simply drop in a new CPU as and when.

If we were talking about a >six month difference then I'd understand (as in when we all thought the 800-series would work with BD), but if the difference is less than say three months, what's the gain? Unless you're missing a board right now.

It's better to wait for the CPU launch, and meanwhile trying to figure out which boards that are good, unless you feel like going guinea pig.

You know the 900-series won't be that spectacular anyway without a BD, so there's no need to be the first. .

[Sn0wm@n]

I know that because I can read



http://www.hardware.fr/articles/815-...dy-bridge.html

That's crazy, isn't it ?

allright then .. didnt see the link anywhere when you quoted that 95watt tdp ...

merci beaucoup pour le lien

[Apokalipse]

So does Intel with HT on. Welcome to 2002.

Bulldozer Module is completely different.

HyperThreading only appears like two cores to the OS.
In reality it only uses the second thread to reduce the amount of time the core spends doing nothing whenever there's a stalled thread.

So for a core without hyperthreading:
cache miss occurs -> requests correct data from memory -> waits for it to arrive -> continues thread

A core with hyperThreading:
cache miss occurs -> requests correct data from memory -> instead of waiting for it and processing the first thread, it starts processesing the second thread.

Each Bulldozer module does actually have the hardware to process two threads simultaneously. It is actually two cores.

HyperThreading doesn't and can't make the one core process two threads simultaneously. It just reduces the time it spends waiting because of stalled threads.

[xdan]

Time*quantity/per core= performance
Even if Amd will have more cores, if they don't reduce also the time in wich a core do the operationS iT's ussless...

[Apokalipse]

Time*quantity/per core= performance
Even if Amd will have more cores, if they don't reduce also the time in wich a core do the operationS iT's ussless...

Of course they are increasing per-core performance. The only question is how much.
I think most likely IPC will at least reach i7 level if not SB level.

Then there's the question of frequency, which depends on manufacturing and materials.
With 32nm and HKMG we can expect better frequencies for sure - again, only question is how much.

And power efficiency depends on a combination of manufacturing, materials, design

Performance depends on a combination of IPC, frequency, and memory access (getting data to/from the cores fast enough for the cores to keep working).

looking at IPC alone only gives you a part of the picture, and looking at frequency alone only gives you part of the picture

[informal]

Time*quantity/per core= performance
Even if Amd will have more cores, if they don't reduce also the time in wich a core do the operationS iT's ussless...

That's why we have to see how it performs. They had a lot of time to develop brand new design.Old one had a few bottlenecks,especially in the execution stage of the pipeline. New core has more flexibility in EX stage and support many new features(wider fronted being able to effectively decode 4+1 x86 instructions(branch fusion),unified math and address scheduler in integer cores, 2x more load/store BW Vs 10h,much much better prefecthing,better branch prediction,4x larger L2 that is shared between core pairs,partitioned L3 that is now 8MBs large,complete ISA support,FMA support,universal FPU design which is able to execute even 2 FADDs or 2FMULs if needed etc.).
There is a LOT of things in BD and if they done it right it can be a lot faster than Thuban. With standard(average) IPC jump of 15%,pure core count jump of 33% and clock jump of 20% with much higher aiming Turbo core versus Thuban,this thing can go a lot higher. Interlagos has the same 33% higher core count and in throughput it's claimed it is 50% faster.Zambezi will have 2x less cores than Interlagos so this means higher clock rate are very possible(stock and Turbo),so 50% of Interlagos advantage may turn in same or somewhat higher number with Zambezi Vs Thuban.