AMD to launch desktop Bulldozer "Zambezi" at E3 Show in L.A. (June 7-9)

[-Boris-]

There are a variety of benchmarks for desktop out there.Many of them are biased one way or the other,many of them have little to do with real world workloads. But at the end of the day,when an Average Joe user reads TR,AT or any other HW website and reads BD review ,he will probably look for the one page that says summary of results.There he will see an overall average score relative to other competing parts. Even if BD trounces other chips in say several heavy fp workloads(rumored CB11.5 score of ~11 ?) it may still be a bit slower in some non-thread integer heavy workload(still to be seen though). This may bring down the average score and put it just a bit over ,or maybe even under, 980x.

Users will have to look at particular tests and what they mean for them. If the test is relevant for you in some way and chip performs as you expected and the pricing fits,there is no reason not to pick it up. I really do expect Zambezi to be a very good desktop chip. Even if it is not overall the fastest thing on desktop,it just needs to be competitive in performance/high end segment. People will buy it.

BD will still need more than 50% higher performance than Phenom II to compete with 980X. Of course there are differences between loads. But if 980X score 50% higher in benches than Phenom II, then BD needs maybe 70%+ higher performance to get these 50% higher results.

A 4GHz chip has twice the performance of a 2GHz chip, but might only have 40% higher FPS. You can't just look at benches and think that they accurately show the differences in performance for a single part of the system.