AMD Zambezi news, info, fans !

[-Boris-]

These quotes from JF's FAQ seems to confirm my anticipations, or lack of there of:

Q. Is IPC higher on bulldozer? All I care about is IPC.A. IPC is simply a measurement. What if IPC was 2X what it is today, but clock speed was 500MHz. Is that what you want? You are getting double IPC, right? IPC is only one measure. The people that are telling you IPC is the only thing that matters have an agenda. Taking only one measurement, out of context, is like trying to say that a person's weight is all that matters. I weigh 195. Does that make me fat? Does that make me skinny? It is impossible to say unless you know my height. IPC is like weight - it tells you something in context to other factors, but is meaningless on its own.

Q. What about single threaded performance?A. See above. Also, if all you care about is single threaded performance, might I recommend a lovely, inexpensive single core processor for your system?

The way he try to mock people who care about IPC and single thread performance makes me believe he is trying to justify bad performance in these areas. We know frequency range, so IPC is important! And single thread performance is important to everyone who isn't building a server. It doesn't matter if you have a million cores, if single thread performance matches a K6-2 you won't be able to play any games today, just using windows would suck

IPC will be low, maybe lower than Phenom II, and that goes for single thread performance as well. Their recent statement of 35% more performance with 33% more cores was the first clear warning of this, that's down from official numbers of 50% more throughput last year. I haven't seen any trustworthy benchmarks yet so this is all speculation, but since all the fuzz is about Llano it doesn't look like BD is the winner in AMDs portfolio. I mean even Llano was a disappointment, you can get more gaming performance at the same price with an AM3 board, Athlon II and a cheap graphics card. Llano is good for laptops and ITX systems, but if that's all AMD will be good at then it looks bleak.


By the way, I'm old AMD fanboy, and i guess I will buy BD after all since i think competition is important, but that's not the best of reasons to switch to the latest CPU.