AMD FX "Bulldozer" Review - (4) !exclusive! Excuse for 1-Threaded Perf.

[omninmo]

great work chew, this may not be what everyone was hoping to hear but it will surely be of assistance to people reading up to see whther BD fits their needs or not!

So on to the juicy stuff, your findings are consistent with a classic resource sharing bottleneck, or so it seems..
To sum it up:
- when a CPU heavy task fully loads both clusters in a CU, the shared resources have a hard time feeding or dealing with both clusters so you notice a bottleneck and performance per thread drops accordingly -> ergo, 4c/4cu wins
- when only one cluster is loaded, or both clusters are being used, but one of them (or both) is/are not being fully loaded, shared resources can keep up and so performance per thread takes a lesser/no impact -> ergo, clockspeed wins

This is fully understandable and seems perfectly logical

Next subject, max clocks:
I'm still confused by something here, please see which interpretation is the correct one (or if both apply):
- 4c/2cu has lower power/thermal footprint, ergo for the same voltage, same cooling, it will clock higher?
or
- Luck of the draw means that you're likely to get different OC potential on all modules, and therefore you might (probably) end up with having to choose a cluster from a module with worse potential when taking the 4c/4cu approach, therefore limiting overall clocks a bit?

Also, for this last part, do you think it plausible that with better air or water cooling (for instance, i have 360 rad custom water loop) and maybe some extra volts one could push those limits higher and reach higher clocks? Perhaps 4.8 ~ 5Ghz across all cores? or is this a pipe dream for this stepping?

Last question:
Have you any idea of the actual power consumption difference between running 4c/2cu vs 4c/4cu vs 8c/4cu @ same clocks all around, for instance, 4.6Ghz? I am considering an upgrade but at this point im afraid my TX650 would not cut it powering a BD 8c OC plus a 6970 or 6870 CF?

My personal opinion on this:
Best case scenario (and the most balanced option for varied daily usage) would be for us to be able to leave them all on, and have AOD or something clock each loaded core higher.. While at the same time having some way to make the os treat one of the clusters in each cu as a "Hyperthreading-like" affair... However im guessing this would require a hefty power draw and adequate high end cooling to control..

Crappy math:
So taking into account an announced (and somewhat accurate, from what we can see) performance penalty of roughly 20% when fully loading both clusters (ex: Civilization or starcraft) we can speculate that it would take roughly 5 ~ 5.2Ghz clocks all around for a "FX-4110" to match performance of a PII x4 @ 4 ~4.2 Ghz. Whereas for less intense games with a 2main, 2 secondary threads would require only around 4.3 to 4.4Ghz.

This would be an avantage to the octa-cores that they could "shine" in both scenarios, we would just need a way to make this hassle free and be able to pair this up with NOT having to reboot or manually change these settings whenever we want to game, or encode, or whatever :P

once again, thank you guys for your awesome work! and also everyone sorry for the long post, feel free to ignore if you wish but i just wanted to see if I had all the facts straight from this "investigation"

Please, do correct my conclusions if you seem fit as I have a feeling these are some of the points other people could benefit from aswell