Preliminary Bulldozer and Llano Pricing Revealed

[Skratch]

Bulldozer will beat Intel's current cpu's in singelthread and perhaps the 980x multithreading. It's quite easy to understand when you look closer at the architecture. The front-end in Bulldozer is pretty big, which says it got a lot of horsepower. Also it must have to feed the double hungry integer units in the module. In the 4 module/8core BD, up to 4 threads the front end can easy get one integer unit 100% buzy in each module with maximum Turbo, which mean very good performance in 1 to 4 threads. What happens with more threaded workload? Yeah, intel's Hyperthreading deliver at most 30% better performance, and means 130% performance per double-threaded utilized core. BD will deliver 160% per double-threaded utilized module. Here we see 640% from a 8 core BD, and 780% from 980x. However, I think the scaling will be much better on BD, and also higher clocked and more aggressive Turbo. The most inportant is what we don't know, and that is how efficient the architecure is.

Worth to notice is that we don't now if the 80%/160% numbers from AMD in multithreading is correct, we don't now how aggressive the Turbo function will be, and much depends on how optimized the software is for Bulldozer. A lot can be rewritten and better optimized for this new design.

I have a hard time believing that because AMD is pricing its fastest BD (at launch)at 320 so there is no way they would sell it that cheap if it was faster than intels chips.

you do realise that intel is coming out with 1000+ dollar sandy bridge extreme chips right? if BD will beat out 1100 dollar intel chips why would they sell them for 320.

back in the A64 days when AMD was faster than intel they put out 800-1000 FX chips becasue they had the performance lead.

also a note

the sandy extremes are only 6 core chips

I hope you are right because that will drop intels prices big time.