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

[BeepBeep2]

Let's make some things clear here. 2 core intel CPUs with SMT have very aggressive Turbo and base clocks(yeah,"blame" intel's superior process tech). Apart from that, 4 "core" Trinity has 2 floating point units(2 threads capable each),same as 2 core+SMT intel solutions. So essentially,what you get is a rough parity in SSE/fp benchmarks if clocks were always equal (which they are not of course).
This is why 8 "core" bulldozer on desktop cannot beat 4 core SB/IB in floating point/SSE workloads. It essentially has the same number of floating point units and in workloads that are not FMA optimized it can only reach parity(or around that level roughly). That is AMD's choice,they targeted the design for server integer workloads leaving FP/SSE to heavy optimizations(FMA) to make up for reduced number of execution units per chip.

Numbers that Trinity shows at least give us clue about solid IPC boost for a "quick fix" (of around 5-10%) and a solid power draw reduction at similar clock as bdver1. If this gives us 4-4.6Ghz Vishera with 5-10% higher IPC then AMD may challenge 8T IB in quite a few workloads.

When was that unclear? Was I wrong in what I said

Khm... you forgot hardware accelerated youtube (HD). are there many people who never used it? Probably everybody uses it...
Almost everybody these days uses gpu just for web browsing. And, the more shaders, the faster page rendering. In many cases only GPU can help to browse comfortably, say in netbooks, tablets, and many desktops.
And it is not just wideo accelerated, many other things.
opera_hw_accelerated.jpgchrome_hw_accelerated.jpg

Also, don't forget, starting from Windows Vista, all windows also hardware accelerated whenever you just move some window.

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How many consumers are doing much more than streaming HD video on their laptops anyway? How many are utilizing GPGPU or playing games? A minority...
A simple 160 shader iGPU @ 400 MHz can cover the majority and lower idle AND load consumption very considerably.

I like APUs, don't get me wrong...and I like the way Trinity is coming along...but CPU performance is a little disappointing when compared to 2 core intel solutions with SMT.

Because I don't play games, I can't wait to see the 18w Trinity lineup.

I can't wait to see how they overclock too though, to be honest

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