CPU/Mobo AMD Bulldozer Discussion Thread

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From reviews the competition is between FX-8150 and i7 920/950.Power consumption is also nearly close to old gen intel cpus.
 
Amd - FACE PALM....
intel - he he he he he ...
Hoping for latest mobos & bios update for this procy to unleash the real beast..
Hitlter Sir your Great loved it thankx for the link...
 
^^ once again i tell you anandtech review was skewed.. But dude Gannu maharaj;) not upto expectations is something different from disappointment or major disappointment..

Let me explain this clearly

1. BD was supposed to release one year to one and a half year ago initially.. so at that time this architecture would have been revolutionary... It got delayed... delayed... and more delayed..

2. The BD uses an architecture not found till today.. The softwares are having a tough time figuring out if the modules work together or as a core... As a matter of fact many people on TE never understood the module theory and it had to be explained to them very specifically!

3. The problem in the architecture is that individual cores in the module are very underpowered.. that is the reason why unless you have all the cores performing a job it will give less performance..

4. Further the chip had problems right from the word go.. the fabrication plant could not properly get the 32nm process going... SB released early and was a phenomenal performer... AMD head quiting and so on..

In the end it is even a marvel that AMD got the BD out... It performs quite well, but in the present competition not upto mark.. I'll sum it up with a quote i had done earlier

When you get an 8-core for the price of a 4-core it is bound to lag in anything that does not make use of all its cores.. so unless you can use all the 8 cores, intel is the way to go!
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Cool boy I have checked everywhere overclock3d.net vid reviews too still nothing... No more talking ... AMD blew themself away entering everywhere they wanted gpu got it from ati... now manufacturing rams are they out of thier mind ?? Yes they are cux reason is they knew bulldozer wont be the fastest & they need to survive in future ... So they are trying new things... may be its good... may be its bad.. fingers crossed hoping always for the best but in reality Intel never dissapointed the buyers I am using q6600 from 4 years still I have not come to a point where I need to upgrade the procy atleast.. Where as my bro upgraded the amd procy 4 times in 6 years & my self 3 times in 8 years ( P3, P4 2.4ghz HT ( 2003) , q6600 2.4ghz ( 2007 sep3)..
 
kaneunderground said:
Cool boy I have checked everywhere overclock3d.net vid reviews too still nothing... No more talking ... AMD blew themself away entering everywhere they wanted gpu got it from ati... now manufacturing rams are they out of thier mind ?? Yes they are cux reason is they knew bulldozer wont be the fastest & they need to survive in future ... So they are trying new things... may be its good... may be its bad.. fingers crossed hoping always for the best but in reality Intel never dissapointed the buyers I am using q6600 from 4 years still I have not come to a point where I need to upgrade the procy atleast.. Where as my bro upgraded the amd procy 4 times in 6 years & my self 3 times in 8 years ( P3, P4 2.4ghz HT ( 2003) , q6600 2.4ghz ( 2007 sep3)..
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In reality, you cannot upgrade your Intel processor without changing the mobo, which does not hold true for your brother. Plus, AMD proccy are cheap on the whole, right?
 
All I've seen today is people posting FAIL again and again without one ounce of introspection!!
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I'm used to it by now.

Let me be clear that I'm disappointed by the release, as much as anyone else.

However if this thread is anything to go by, there are going to be at least 35,000 units of 2500 or 2600k CPUs sold in the next five days by those disappointed by/waiting for the Bulldozer. Intel will surely be happy if that happens.

But I'm pretty certain that is not going to happen. Watch the show-off section, and let's see how many screaming 'fail' on this thread are picking up the Sandy Bridge CPUs (or anything else). I find flamebaiting a despicable tactic, and apart from two or three technical discussions the rest are about the disappointment without a single valid, rational or 'tech' based comment. I think it may be time to consider a name change for the forum.

Not every car maker has the goal of building the fastest car.

Not every user needs the fastest car.

The fastest car is not the fastest in every situation.

I was hoping for an IPC close to the 2500 (in this thread I predicted it would be close to the 2400, and that seems to be more or less true with a few exception) and much, much better power efficiency.

For 99% of my usage, an Athlon II x4 640 is enough. It may be a bottleneck in some games even in a GPU-limited situation, but for the most part it is far more powerful than I need. I suspect most users pottering about in Windows with HW-accelerated Flash and Aero Desktops would also get by with much cheaper and less capable systems than can be built with even an i3 2100 or a similar AMD CPU.

But since most people on this thread seem to be running render farms or video transcoding labs, or seem to want bragging rights, for which only the fastest processors in the world can fix, they should buy what they need.

Let's get one thing right. If you need the power, yes SB is the quickest under 20k. No dispute there. Do you need the quickest? Dunno.

SB is not always the quickest, even within the Intel portfolio, and not for long given Ivy Bridge is up ahead.

And AMD needs to beat Intel quickly - otherwise you zap back to the P3/K6 generation when AMD was so far behind that Intel could release lemon after lemon and the gullible public would simply buy it. That's already kind of happening - you are paying a premium for unlocked products. You are forced to buy a chipset that is artificially hobbled because it's so starved for bandwidth it can't do more than 24 lanes of PCIe.

You may not realise it, but a monopoly is very dangerous.

And the people who are being suckered into thinking that the fastest CPU is the best are at the forefront on being brainwashed into buying products that are artificially locked down and starved of features and technology.

My bottomline is: Buy what you need.

Let's have a tech discussion here to power that choice. There are too many +1 posts, and too many of them on the forums altogether.
 
For 99% of my usage, an Athlon II x4 640 is enough. It may be a bottleneck in some games even in a GPU-limited situation, but for the most part it is far more powerful than I need. I suspect most users pottering about in Windows with HW-accelerated Flash and Aero Desktops would also get by with much cheaper and less capable systems than can be built with even an i3 2100 or a similar AMD CPU.
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Aah but that's not the point, no one is contending the value of an Athlon 2 X4, its the value of the FX processors which are at a contention. Your argument is why do you need to buy a 10k proccy, when a 5k proccy can do all what you want. I dont argue with that, but if I am hell bent on spending 10k on a proccy :P why would I spend on AMD. That is the contention.

PS: My comp is dead since a month, and I was waiting for BD. I am buying SB this weekend. And yes I know that Athlon X4 would be able to do all my tasks, but somehow I want a "more powerful" CPU, for photoshop editing..
 
mrcool63 said:
But dude Gannu maharaj;) not upto expectations is something different from disappointment or major disappointment..
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Given all the technical explanations and verbiage, the processor which was supposed to compete with the SB lineup has clearly failed in some of the aspects. When some of them were asking for upgrade suggestions in the other section, they were asked to wait for the BD reviews. I am quite certain, they know the answer by now. More than that, I am glad I decided to invest my money on a SB setup back in May rather than waiting for the BD launch. As far as my usages are concerned, this processor fails to deliver in those applications. Is it power efficient - NO, performance in single threaded applications - poor. So there goes the incentives. So this is indeed a disappointment for me as was the case for several folks in the thread and the reviewers alike.

However, I must add that the FX-8120 is a good competitor for the i5 2500k, considering decent motherboards from AMD aren't as pricey as the Intel ones.
 
but if I am hell bent on spending 10k on a proccy
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Point taken, and for a minute I'm not suggesting that at any given price point an AMD processor is better than Intel. Or vice versa.

And that's exactly what I have been trying to say. When it comes down to the buying decision, what are the needs to be fulfilled? What are the connectivity options required? What is the energy efficiency? What does the platform need to stretch to? Stay within?

The trouble starts when people look at a benchmark chart and start crapping on threads. Is the BD a technically disappointing release? Yes it is. Will it sell? Maybe? Are everyone who buy it fools? Though the answer seems to be yes at face value, the fact is that for some users under some conditions, the BD architecture does make sense today. I do know someone who spends about 80% of their time in floating-point heavy renders, and those applications love parallel processing. As benchmarks have shown, there are some apps that use that capability of the architecture well. And today.

'It doesn't work for you' doesn't mean 'it doesn't work'.

Edit: In light of my concurrent thread on a revamp of my system, the performance of BD is a huge disappointment. Not because it's not quick enough, but because it is too power hungry (and everything else that goes with such a thing) and has no better IPC than previous generation AMD products for most of the tasks that I need it for. For my tasks and usage a x4 980 makes much more sense with a feature-laden 990FX board. The SB will be quicker, but an equivalent board with a Z68 chipset is about 30% more expensive, and doesn't have either x16 multiGPU anyway. The additional speed for me is a waste. I use no pro apps, except audio recording, and there memory size matters far more than pure CPU speed.

Then there's the CPU price itself. Pretty sure BD will launch around 14k or so, where it's a no go. So I'm a little stuck for options. At the same time, I'm not crying my eyes out. This is technology. Sometimes you win, sometimes you don't. AMD will get by, and Intel will do so too. The only people to actually bear the brunt will be the users. such as me.
 
The trouble starts when people look at a benchmark chart and start crapping on threads. Is the BD a technically disappointing release? Yes it is. Will it sell? Maybe? Are everyone who buy it fools? Though the answer seems to be yes at face value, the fact is that for some users under some conditions, the BD architecture does make sense today. I do know someone who spends about 80% of their time in floating-point heavy renders, and those applications love parallel processing. As benchmarks have shown, there are some apps that use that capability of the architecture well. And today.
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Sangram, apart from a few apps. AFAIK almost all apps which are heavily multi-threaded prefer SB. And I think you are not stressing enough on the thermal foot print. Even if that proccy (FX 8150) was available for 7-8k, I would yet not touch it, as I leave my comp on most of the time. TR has a very good analysis on energy consumed with work done, and BD falls flat out there:

AMD's FX-8150 'Bulldozer' processor - The Tech Report - Page 16
 
Are there any VM comparisons for the FX processors anywhere on the net, I can't find any. MY primary criteria is VM performance, and intend to run EXi/EXsi or Citrix Xen Center. Previously the 1100T performed lot lot better than even an i7 970x or a 980X and even SB wasn't much better at beating the 1100T on a scenario with about 10~20 Vms.

I highly doubt if VMware/Citrix will soon release performance fix updated for a BD platform. It they do, i ll definitely go for a BD as even my current B50 is able to satisfy my all other regular desktop performance needs.

But somewhere around im having a feeling that AMD should have gone with adding 2 more cores to 1100T, shifting to 32nm fab and add more cache, say 1MB L2 per core and 8/12MB L3 shared and stock clocks of 3.6Ghz or above with Turbo and under 145W tdp. It wouldve blown the charts away and silently improving the BD architecture in the background until they are mature.
 
Actually very heavy thread apps prefer BD, apps which are a mix of FP and integer with reasonably light thread loads prefer SB. It doesn't only depend on the number of threads, but also their length. A short thread will work better on SB or indeed the older AMDs because of shorter pipes, but heavy thread load (long instruction sequences) will work better on BD.

Look at your situation, it does make sense to go for SB.

Let's take this page from a typical review:

Benchmark Results: Content Creation : AMD FX-8150 Review: From Bulldozer To Zambezi To FX

The 8150 competes with the 2600k (remember it is cheaper) in 4 of 6 tests. It doesn't beat it in any but one. I would imagine that a user can look at it and figure out that it might be a decent enough bridge system for such kind of use.

Oh, and in PS, it does beat the 2600k.

Agreed about the power consumption and like I said, if in your case if you have made a measured decision, that's fine.

My question is, who else has?

Lest you think I'm underplaying the power footprint, I'm not. It is the one reason that's keeping me away from BD, far more than anything else. But that's how it is. All we can hope is that shipping CPUs fix it. There seem to be a lot of wasted instructions flying around inside the chip, which explains why it works well in some cases, not so much in others, and sucks power equal to its rated TDP.

There is one more thing.

The desktop CPU market is less than 1% of the total CPUs sold by the industry. Even with 40% removed for embedded and OEM, that's 60% in institutional and server markets. Frankly, neither Intel nor AMD would give a damn if all of us perished tomorrow. CPUs aren't designed for us, so we choose what's best for each other.

You have to understand where BD came from, it was a clocked-up server chip which doesn't work well in single-unit installations like a consumer desktop. Add this to the above paragraph and the picture begins to emerge.
 
The desktop CPU market is less than 1% of the total CPUs sold by the industry. Even with 40% removed for embedded and OEM, that's 60% in institutional and server markets. Frankly, neither Intel nor AMD would give a damn if all of us perished tomorrow. CPUs aren't designed for us, so we choose what's best for each other.
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I think the majority of shipments are for notebook. Let me search where I had read that. That is the reason I am more concerned for AMD's future, sure Llano made headway, but BD architecture seems to be a failure for mobile chips. AMD has realized the importance of performance per watt, and state they should see a 50% improvement from now till 2014. AMD also knows BD is not gonna make money in the non enterprise market. Lets hope for our sake, they are able to make a difference in the enterprise market.

Oh, and in PS, it does beat the 2600k.
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Not as per Anand:

AnandTech - The Bulldozer Review: AMD FX-8150 Tested
 
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