AMD Zambezi news, info, fans !

[jimbo75]

I've a question, am I the only one that think it's embarrassing/funny/weird that they compare there new top model against a 1,5 year old processor that probably performs worse then the 2500k/2600k in the comparing games. Imo that make this (http://tof.canardpc.com/view/a53a68e...1068e8af28.jpg) slide worthless because if they would have compared it with the better performing 2500/2600 the slide would have looked very very different...

Don't you think it's embarrassing/funny/weird that their $1K top model loses more than it wins in gaming to their $220 model?

It's marketing. People are extremely stupid and actually believe that price indicates performance. They will see slides like this and think "WOW thats AMAZING". Enthusiasts know the score so why bother with it unless you are just looking to nit-pick irrelevent stuff? Believe it or not, it's a marketing teams job to make their chip look AS BEST AS POSSIBLE. That's what they are doing. Remember the 36% faster in gaming physics benchmark intel did for the new SB-E's? Or did you just deliberately forget that?

[Lokinhow]

Guys, Wprime is integer or floating point intensive?

[hirsch]

ok i dont plan on derailing a thread thats in the AMD section, so my last point is that the markets for low medium and high is set by prices, not the size of the chip. to say intel is better in all of them is no where near true, because AMD is always trying to offer better value (meaning perf/price).

I think you are right so this will be my last point/post about this too.

First of all I've to say that I only looked at the game benchmarks because imo that's real performance and that what matters to most people, not some synthetic tests (even if they matters to me ).

Lets compare i3 2100 vs. AMD's flagship, 1090T

First round goes to AMD (Full HD)


Second round goes to Intel


Third round goes to Intel

Maybe you are right, AMD TRIES to offer performance/price, but if their flagship can't even win against Intel's low/mid-end segment, that's bad and that's not what I call for competition. I can tell you one other thing, here in sweden the Intel-2100 costs about 1 000SEK vs. AMD 1090T costs about 1 500SEK, so basically it's 50% more expensive and performs worse in real applications, real performance. Sure the 1090T performs better in almost all the synthetic tests, but what do you think the market cares about? Let's say all of the 465 000 000 gamers out there, FPS in games or score in Cinebench 11.5R?

--

Please, don't missunderstand me or take me for a hater. I really like AMD and I have lots of chips from them myself, but what I don't like is when people are trying to convince me that AMD is better then Intel in any perspective of what market want (which includes low-/mid- and high-end as I said). I buy AMD for different reasons then performance, so no I don't have "two faces"...

(Charts from here http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1501/1/)

[hirsch]

Don't you think it's embarrassing/funny/weird that their $1K top model loses more than it wins in gaming to their $220 model?

It's marketing. People are extremely stupid and actually believe that price indicates performance. They will see slides like this and think "WOW thats AMAZING". Enthusiasts know the score so why bother with it unless you are just looking to nit-pick irrelevent stuff? Believe it or not, it's a marketing teams job to make their chip look AS BEST AS POSSIBLE. That's what they are doing. Remember the 36% faster in gaming physics benchmark intel did for the new SB-E's? Or did you just deliberately forget that?

Ehm, why should that be embarrassing/funny/weird? As you probably know, most of the games out there (today) can't use more than 4 cores, in best case. And games dosen't benefit that much from CPU-power if it isn't the bottleneck - right? And what do you mean with this "People are extremely stupid and actually believe that price indicates performance"? In my point of view, price indicates performance VERY well. For example compare the i3-2100 to the i7-2600k - which have the best performance and cost the most... <--- PRICE indicate PERFORMANCE, end of that discussion!

[jimbo75]

Ehm, why should that be embarrassing/funny/weird? As you probably know, most of the games out there (today) can't use more than 4 cores, in best case. And games dosen't benefit that much from CPU-power if it isn't the bottleneck - right? And what do you mean with this "People are extremely stupid and actually believe that price indicates performance"? In my point of view, price indicates performance VERY well. For example compare the i3-2100 to the i7-2600k - which have the best performance and cost the most... <--- PRICE indicate PERFORMANCE, end of that discussion!

Except it doesn't. See my previous example where the Gulftowns and SB-E's massively higher price clearly does not lead to higher gaming performance. See the higher clocked, cheaper Deneb quads that outperform the more expensive Thuban's.

Price does not equate to performance in gaming, but the general public has zero clue about that. All they will see is a much cheaper chip performing the same as an incredibly expensive chip. What did you say in your last few posts? Only gaming performance matters, and you are an "enthusiast" who would pay $1k for the best cpu? Did you buy Gulftown 18 months ago? Cuz until SB it WAS the fastest gaming cpu and still is in the higher threaded ones.

[hirsch]

Except it doesn't. See my previous example where the Gulftowns and SB-E's massively higher price clearly does not lead to higher gaming performance. See the higher clocked, cheaper Deneb quads that outperform the more expensive Thuban's.

Price does not equate to performance in gaming, but the general public has zero clue about that. All they will see is a much cheaper chip performing the same as an incredibly expensive chip. What did you say in your last few posts? Only gaming performance matters, and you are an "enthusiast" who would pay $1k for the best cpu? Did you buy Gulftown 18 months ago? Cuz until SB it WAS the fastest gaming cpu and still is in the higher threaded ones.

Gulftown/SB-e maybe isn't worth their price if we are talking gaming performance but still the price indicates their performance because SB-e (6 core) will probably be the best performing chip in the world when it releases (just like 980x/990x are or were) in any applications (games/benchmarks/what ever). "See the higher clocked, cheaper Deneb quads that outperform the more expensive Thuban's." as I said, most of todays games can't benefit from more then 4 cores, so ofcourse Denebs will benefit from higher freq. when both deneb and thuban are based on the same articheture. But in that scenario we are talking about 1 or maybe 5 FPS at most, right?

And the only reason that I used gaming performance for my comparison was that the review I founded only included gaming benchmarks that should show real performance. Earlier this day I read that it's more than 465 000 000 gamers in the world today, so just ask yourself if they would've read that review, would they care about FPS in games or score in Cinebench?

Yes I did, and I've chips from both Intel and AMD (ex. 980x/930/2600k/1090T/965/940).

[dess]

How useful are the xop and fma instruction sets for desktop apps, and if they are, what are the chances that developers will bother optimizing only for AMD cpus?

Not sure about the importance of FMA on desktop. Also, some say it will be neglected because of Intel's FMA3, that AFAIK also Piledriver will support (a year before Intel itself!). Altough, I would think if one is going to use FMA in his codes, it's not as hard to support both, indeed in case of OpenCL.

In the other hand, XOP being an additional integer SIMD extension has probably more place on the desktop, think f.ex. videoconverters, games... Althogh, some also bring up AVX2, but that's to come with Haswell only. (Didn't heard if Piledriver were going to support it, as well.)

[jimbo75]

Hirsch the point is, this is marketing. You are failing to understand what the point of marketing is.

If you take 100 random people who were only interested in gaming, and show them 2 pc's, each with a price sticker on them, which one would they choose? The Gulftown or the SB?

99 of them would take the Gulftown because they would believe it MUST be the faster gaming cpu. 99/100 people have zero concept of multi-threading, or that games only use a few cores. They would simply see the price difference and assume that the more expensive pc MUST be the faster gaming pc.

As an enthusiast you know it's not the case but it's not "embarrassing" that AMD chose to compare to Gulftown, it's just pure marketing sense.

[Manicdan]

and how many gamers need 300fps? which is where half those benchmarks ended, only 2 of them in one you mentioned were under 60fps. you just pointed out the fact that gamers can be happy with any modern cpu.

price reflects a cpus ability to perform in low and high threaded tasks,so thuban is cheap because in single threaded its not nearly as competitive as it is in multithreaded.

can we pls stop with the "whats better" argument, thanks

[hirsch]

Hirch the point is, this is marketing. You are failing to understand what the point of marketing is.

If you take 100 random people who were only interested in gaming, and show them 2 pc's, each with a price sticker on them, which one would they choose? The Gulftown or the SB?

99 of them would take the Gulftown because they would believe it MUST be the faster gaming cpu. 99/100 people have zero concept of multi-threading, or that games only use a few cores. They would simply see the price difference and assume that the more expensive pc MUST be the faster gaming pc.

As an enthusiast you know it's not the case but it's not "embarrassing" that AMD chose to compare to Gulftown, it's just pure marketing sense.

You are right and that's what I've been trying to say.

And that is exactly what is embarrassing, their marketing team shouldn't need to do that if bulldozer would have been that good I was hopping for! A real comparsation would've been against the 2600K, that was my point and ofcourse I understand why they compared it with the 980x (that's why i talked about the price/performance-slide, I said it would've been worthless if they compared it against the 2600K). This is why I'm started to get so disapointed with bulldozer if all the facts are true....

[hirsch]

and how many gamers need 300fps? which is where half those benchmarks ended, only 2 of them in one you mentioned were under 60fps. you just pointed out the fact that gamers can be happy with any modern cpu.

price reflects a cpus ability to perform in low and high threaded tasks,so thuban is cheap because in single threaded its not nearly as competitive as it is in multithreaded.

can we pls stop with the "whats better" argument, thanks

Better performance today, means better performance tomorrow. Let's say that, setup #1 gives you 120fps in games 2011 and setup #2 gives you 70fps in games 2011. Which setup should perform best in future games?

What I say now is that a regular user can never get too "future-proof". It isn't everyone that change hardware every week...

[BeepBeep2]

Why did someone just put out a chart with a 1090T vs i3 2100, then talk about how bad the 1090T is compared to the 2100?

Why are people arguing? Why are we having these stupid discussions? Launch is 3 weeks away...while I still stand on my hypothesis you all can talk about how bad Bulldozer will be without me.

If you have a 5.2 Ghz BD on water...which runs like a 4 core with HT (by the way, I was told not to utter HT anymore earlier in this thread because apparently comparing AMD's CMT to Intel's SMT better known as HT is not valid)
and you put it up against a Core i7 2600K @ 5 Ghz, which will win? Probably the 2600K by a factor of 5-10% in single thread and ~5% in multithread.
If you go LN2, 7.3 Ghz BD vs 2600K @ 5.8, which will win?

Bulldozer will most likely claim the sub-zero performance crown from intel for a while, at least...until 3930K is released, which will still be locked to 63x or less.

[Manicdan]

if your looking for perf in future games, you would never recommend just 2 cores
and none of them had a gap that big while being in the same price range

ive already recommended multiple people to get a 2500k as a gaming cpu since its not very expensive and should last 4-5 years (basically i expect it to handle almost every game of the next gen consoles, excluding games with crap coding). once BD comes out i might recommend something different, maybe a 6100 depending on scaling of CMT and overclockability

[hirsch]

if your looking for perf in future games, you would never recommend just 2 cores
and none of them had a gap that big while being in the same price range

ive already recommended multiple people to get a 2500k as a gaming cpu since its not very expensive and should last 4-5 years (basically i expect it to handle almost every game of the next gen consoles, excluding games with crap coding). once BD comes out i might recommend something different, maybe a 6100 depending on scaling of CMT and overclockability

I've so many arguements for what you are saying right now, but please let us go back to topic because this is meaningless, we have different thoughts and clearly, no one of us is ready to change them.

[Opteron146]

Maybe you are right, AMD TRIES to offer performance/price, but if their flagship can't even win against Intel's low/mid-end segment, that's bad and that's not what I call for competition. I can tell you one other thing, here in sweden the Intel-2100 costs about 1 000SEK vs. AMD 1090T costs about 1 500SEK, so basically it's 50% more expensive and performs worse in real applications, real performance. Sure the 1090T performs better in almost all the synthetic tests, but what do you think the market cares about? Let's say all of the 465 000 000 gamers out there, FPS in games or score in Cinebench 11.5R?

Ehh you are giving 3 slides of Game benches and talk about "real applications" ? And then you call Cinebench synthetic? Way off, games are still badly optimized for more than 4 threads and Cinebench is not only a bench, the Cinema4D Engine is used in real-world movie productions. If you only game then yes, a i3 is a nice choice, however I personally like to overclock, hence I am more interested in a FX4000.

[Oese]

next thing is that again AMD will deliver latest and most exiting tech, which will really be fun to test out and tweak. Intel will eventually again copy this tech like they did with x64, HyperTransport, internal IMC, Fusion... bring it on a smaller node, better process... And win, eventually.

Its pure economical brute force that lets Intel win at the moment, they are not anyway near as innovative as AMD. Some prefetch/HT frontend optimizations bein the exeption from that rule.

As a tech enthusiast, i see AMD brings more exiting stuff on the table. Really, i thought about if this time a BD would really pay off. Only dealbreaker could be power consumption if it is much worse then intel, but then i'd rather stay with my 1055T overclocked then buying a new system, until AMD comes with a better version of this new tech...

I am exited to say the least and urging for news like with every release before...

[Miwo]

curious to see what kind of difference Core Affinity will make on applications. For instance, say a game uses 4 cores max. I would think that assigning cores 1, 3, 5, 7 would work better than Auto or 1-4 due to shared resources in the new architecture

[dess]

curious to see what kind of difference Core Affinity will make on applications. For instance, say a game uses 4 cores max. I would think that assigning cores 1, 3, 5, 7 would work better than Auto or 1-4 due to shared resources in the new architecture

It was told it's probably not the case. The overhead is only some 10%, but you could gain double of that with a 4-core only turbo.

[Solus Corvus]

These latest slides don't make me feel any different about my earlier conclusion. I feel the most likely explanation is that GF missed AMD's clock target by ~25% or so, while keeping it within existing TDP envelopes. Obviously these chips can clock WAY higher (with enough cooling). And this is an architecture that is designed for clocks, yet the stock clocks aren't even any higher than their current arch.

The upshot is that we may get some really high clocking chips for cheap. AMD has to stay within TDP limits to satisfy partners, but we don't. So the real battle will be which chips perform the best at the average max overclocks. If SB tops out around 4.5-5GHz and BD tops out around 5.5-6Ghz on high end water I'll have to see how they both bench in my apps (3d deconvolution and volume rendering, microscopic digital holography, VMs, massive multitasking, etc) because I couldn't likely predict that outcome. The downside is that for the stock speeds to improve and thus AMD's market position and margins they may have to wait for the next process from GF - and that's quite the downer.

This is going to be the last time I post about BD until after release. I've said all I need to say.

[BeepBeep2]

BD is not going to do 6 Ghz on water.
5.5 benching would be a stretch.

chew* already posted frequency numbers, what he's done so far is low-mid 5 Ghz on air/water bench and 6+ phase, 6.5-6.9 dice, LN2 ~ 7.5-8 Ghz, LHe gave them 8.4 valid.

I'd expect 5.0 for high end air, high end water maybe 5.2-5.3?

BTW, no X6 or X4 turbos to 4.2 Ghz, and we only have X4's at 3.7... actually some of us cant get 4.2 Ghz within a 200w TDP overclocking...

[Dumo]

Can BD bench 3D @ 7Ghz 2C/2T??...Thats the (simple) question.

We all know that 2600K that max out/valid @ 5.8Ghz will (99% sure) bench 2C/2T @ 5.75Ghz all day

[boxleitnerb]

Has this already been posted? For the game benches with the 980X they used only a HD6870:



For the other benchmarks, they mostly used 6970 CF or a 6950. AMD must really think people are stupid...

[muziqaz]

Has this already been posted? For the game benches with the 980X they used only a HD6870:

http://www.abload.de/thumb/fakers2q7oa.jpg

For the other benchmarks, they mostly used 6970 CF or a 6950. AMD must really think people are stupid...

I agree completely, if those slides are true, person who done those tests really does not respect their customers.
If it was me who was shown those slides, I would consider it an insult to me :/
Maybe it was Rick, who made those slides? That's why he is out of AMD

[liberato87]

the specs of the cinebench slide (20) are the only one missing.. why?

[undone]

Has this already been posted? For the game benches with the 980X they used only a HD6870:



For the other benchmarks, they mostly used 6970 CF or a 6950. AMD must really think people are stupid...

WHAT THE xxxx amd why are you lying to us?