Quote Originally Posted by Greg83 View Post
...
I saw this "All of this talk about engineering samples is really annnoying because they are not designed around performance. So trying to measure something for performance when it is designed for validation is really pointless."
they're not crippled. they were never designed for performance in the first place. only validation...
Maybe i should explain myself a little bit.
We all know that ES`s are meant for validation purposes.Thats why they most often than not, have lower clocks with higher voltage and sometimes even feature turned off.
Problem is, Current B0 samples are behaving VERY badly compared clock for clock to DENEB,plus some scores are just plain weird.
Most of the people assumed it was AMD`s strategy to blindfold us and competitors from knowing true performance.
JF said it is not the case.
So it is or was some real problem with B0 stepping cpu.
So all we know for sure ATM, is that B0 BD cpus have some kind of error, in silicon or microcode.JF has not stated that, or said that there is another stepping that fixes that, he basically havent said anything.He cant, he works at AMD and current policy is not to tell anything.
Let me be clear once again, BD B0 is currently slower Than deneb or even athlon CLOCK FOR CLOCK.That cant be neither good, neither fault of the ES designation, as it was supposed to be faster clock for clock than deneb.Look at informals sig ;-).Whole another thing is different retail clocks and turbo.

As for SB950, its the same as SB850.Carbon copy.Maybe drivers will improve something.I wasnt aware that theres something wrong with Sb850 tho.