AMD Zambezi news, info, fans !

[JumpingJack]

I found this article to be interesting. If bulldozer is struggling with floats, then we have trouble ahead. Integer workloads are incredibly important for many tasks, but floating point can't be ignored. Sticking these into a Cray won't be very useful with poor float performance . Any ideas why this might be the case? Mostly I'm curious as to whether this is the performance issue or the bug (or both) that they talk about. My guess is that the performance is lacking in floats due to heat. The FMAC is shared, and probably gets crispy in large workloads while integer units are more evenly distributed about the core...

Frankly, the only weight I give to it is that he mimics that BD will be pushed out, the rest of his analysis/commentary is, at most, questionable.

Theo is not the most technically astute journalist on the net. In fact, is more often wrong than he is right. He is looking at the technical disclosures of BD and extrapolating a conclusion relative to SB based on his understanding of compute architectures of which he knows little to nothing about.

EDIT: There are really 3 tech sites that give good analysis of compute architectures -- Arstechnica, Jon Stokes -- Realworld Tech, David Kanter -- and Anandtech, Anand Shrimpi. All 3 have educational backgrounds on the subject -- as I understand it, Stokes and Kanter actually roomed together in college. I would not trust much of what Theo has to say regarding this topic.