AMD "Piledriver" refresh of Zambezi - info, speculations, test, fans

[BeepBeep2]

I see no reason to repeat stuff, so just read the posts above this one, and look at non-hand picked results.

Still waiting on your facts on 32nm thuban/agena. But I see you changed direction after being called out on it

Considering half the results lean heavily toward Thuban being the better architecture and the other results show FX matching Sandy Bridge (in MT performance only...losing up to 80% in single thread) using 25% more power to do it.

Facts on 32nm Thuban/Agena? Changed direction after being called out on it?
Llano's refined core was supposed to gain up to 5% IPC, correct?
Lets say we shrunk Thuban but used Llano's core...a 6 core would be 269mm^2 like I stated before, correct? Assuming that the 32nm process can produce chips that function at least as good as the 45nm, (or maybe something like the 90nm > 65nm transition was at least) we would have chips with a much smaller die and less power consumption than current BD, producing much more performance per mm^2 even if you ignore the power consumption. I didn't say "Add two cores for Phenom II X8 and set it at 4 Ghz" like informal thought I did. Anyway, the X6 CPU performs very close to BD in real world apps when both are overclocked to 4.2/4.8. Also, "STARS" is very bandwidth starved, the more you overclock ram and overclock CPUNB the better it performs, what if it had the type of bandwidth available that BD has? More IPC improvement.

The only comment I made about an eight core with the old uarch was that the die size would be around 330-340mm^2, only slightly bigger than BD is today (~5-10%). Anyway, who knows if they couldn't have added two more cores AND increased clock? Even if clockspeed had to be reduced, it would still perform better than BD. Lets say we could only get 3.8 Ghz out of the architecture on 32nm with 8 cores. Would that not perform better than BD? Look what they did going from X4 to X6, the CPUs overclocked just as well, and still do, compared to recent quads. Would it be hard to prove that shrinking Thuban would have brought more performance per mm^2 over BD on 32nm? No, not at all. I believe the answer is quite clear in the first paragraph of this post.