Disappointing BD, so far. Another bad AMD decision?

So far BD has been a disappointment, it takes an FX-8130 just to match the performance of a 1090T, and as for the 2500K it was meant to compete with....forget it!

Yes the architecture is brand new, Win 7 is not yet capable of running BD to its full potential, in the future once the OS compatibility is sorted it will no doubt perform better, but a significant markup from the Thuban's it replaces? doubtful.

So would AMD not just have been better off shrinking Thuban's die to 32nm and adding another two logical cores to its existing six?

Frakk said:

So far BD has been a disappointment, it takes an FX-8130 just to match the performance of a 1090T, and as for the 2500K it was meant to compete with....forget it!

Yes the architecture is brand new, Win 7 is not yet capable of running BD to its full potential, in the future once the OS compatibility is sorted it will no doubt perform better, but a significant markup from the Thuban's it replaces? doubtful.

So would AMD not just have been better off shrinking Thuban's die to 32nm and adding another two logical cores to its existing six?

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Yeah, okay we got it as a forum goer's in here. But what you suggest will never happen since AMD is forging ahead in their chosen direction.

Give the BD some real work to do and it will roll up its' sleves and do it very well when working with multiple renders in photochop or video renders or something that is work. Single threaded or poorly threaded apps are not its' forte...no sir and won't be when M$ finishes a patch or rewrite of Win8 when you get only less than a 3% increase in single threaded apps.

Joe Six Pack will not have your issues or desires. He is in the store buying 8 cores or modules or APU's or smoothies. Who knows? He got it gone out the door.

Iffen you need to bench with todays benches then you ain't got to spend no money looking at your signature if you want to use AMD. If you want high benches you need Intel, but then that has been the way for a few years now. That did not change with BD's release and a mature fab won't fix it and the Pile Driver won't likely fix it either.

Air it all is as we close out 2011 and nothing much going to change in 2012. Oh yes there will be new stuff to buy, but it is not going to change the single threaded benchmark results.

Happy New Year all.

Your right, perhaps i and other AMD loyalists are wrong or even misguided to place so much emphasis on raw benching data. consistently BD does outperform Thuban in some actual every day use aspects, and its way better for over clocking.

And there is another thing, the original Phenom I was quickly polished up to make the Phenom II with a performance increase.

Perhaps in 2012 they will take the polish to BD's.

As for APU's, i think they have good potential, while nothing special on there own, they have already proven to out perform equivalent Intels in DX10 / DX11 and are priced very aggressively. The first releases are aimed at mid-range gaming but hopefully later there will be more muscular units on sale.

Yes the topic of 2012 will be AMD, for better or worse they are stealing the limelight.

Happy new year

To be perfectly honest BD isn't really a bad chip. I believe their main problem is in automating the design process. If they can cut out most of those inactive transistors in the design they'll have one very lean processor. I believe their main mistake has been in trying to automate the fabrication process instead of hand crafting it.

I suspect that Piledriver will be little more than a hand crafter version of Bulldozer, saving on transistors and allowing better clocks and higher efficiency. Beyond that, AMD's belief is still that more and more apps will make use of the GPU instead of the CPU. From this point they're working towards changing GPU's to more of a vector based solution. Should be very interesting as it'll make the GPU component much more flexable in the workloads it can perform effectively.

Take a bit of a read of the below:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/07/amd_graphics_core_next/

Mind you, if they don't pull this off, I wouldn't be surprised if AMD disappears altogether.

mjw21a said:

To be perfectly honest BD isn't really a bad chip. I believe their main problem is in automating the design process. If they can cut out most of those inactive transistors in the design they'll have one very lean processor. I believe their main mistake has been in trying to automate the fabrication process instead of hand crafting it.

I suspect that Piledriver will be little more than a hand crafter version of Bulldozer, saving on transistors and allowing better clocks and higher efficiency. Beyond that, AMD's belief is still that more and more apps will make use of the GPU instead of the CPU. From this point they're working towards changing GPU's to more of a vector based solution. Should be very interesting as it'll make the GPU component much more flexable in the workloads it can perform effectively.

Take a bit of a read of the below:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/07/amd_graphics_core_next/

Mind you, if they don't pull this off, I wouldn't be surprised if AMD disappears altogether.

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Yeah, i did read something similar on APU's somewhere else hence my APU comment, i think its very interesting stuff.

But to your last comment you should read this

I know the rumour mill is always prevalent on the Internet and one should always take what one reads there with a large serving of salt, but AMD have put a lot of faith in there new processor range, if its not going to work for them its not an unthinkable thing for them to throw in the towel and concentrate on the portable market instead, that is after-all where the future is and they would be daft to ignore it.

Win 7 is not yet capable of running BD to its full potential,

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it isnt windows 7 fault, it is AMD's fault for making a bad chip, it is that simple, even in multithreaded applications Intels i series is faster with HT than almost all of AMD line in almost every applications.

Why do you think AMD just fired most of it's staff who were working around BD ?

BD for AMD was intel Prehot, but AMD doesnt have the market to still sell millions of them to naive consumers.

I dont think they will throw in the towel, but they need to move on from BD real fast! or make some major changes to it.

I see no reason to be loyal to AMD or intel, my loyalty goes where the performance is, neither Intel nor AMD care about you.

Its only SB that out benches equivalent Thuban's, you put a 960 or 940 i7 Intel up-against a 1090T or 1100T and suddenly the tables are turned, Windows 7 is formatted for SB, that's no secret, to say Windows has nothing to do with it is a bit short sighted.

The OS and the drivers contained with-in it are important to how well the processor works.

But i do take your point to a certain extent, yet the truth is we don't know what BD is actually capable of yet because,- NO actually Windows does not yet know how to handle the brand new architecture in the form of BD.

W7 Formatted for SB? Im not sure what you mean there...at all. Like MrG said, its not W7 fault, its AMD's for making something not work to its fullest potential with the OS's available.

But this has been discussed ad nauseum in the BD thread too.

No, from what I've seen the fault is not one of the architecture, which is still an interesting one, but rather using the automated process to fabricate them. How many transistors did AMD drop from their official count? 800,000 or so?

Apparently going from counting total transistors to total active transistors. Now whoever made the decision to automate the process rather than hand crafting them should be shot. I look forward to seeing what the architecture can do when humans rather than machines figure out whats required. Should be rather interesting.

Mind you, I'm still waiting for 2013 before I upgrade. I think my current rig has enough grunt to last until then.

Fabrication is also AMD's problem. Its not in the OS.

I never did say it was the OS. All I'm saying is there's plenty of room to improve, and that its not the fault of the architecture itself. At what point did I say anything about what OS the chip is running?

mjw21a said:

I never did say it was the OS. All I'm saying is there's plenty of room to improve, and that its not the fault of the architecture itself. At what point did I say anything about what OS the chip is running?

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I think its for me

I have them all jumping on a bandwagon again lol

Ah, Frak it then

Are you a Battlestar fan dude?

Yeah, that wasnt meant for you.. I replied to Frakk (post below his), then you jumped on in.

mjw21a said:

Ah, Frak it then

Are you a Battlestar fan dude?

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That's uncanny, how did you guess?

I thought the new one was quite good, a bit slow in places but well written, directed and so on...

The truth is i'm not much good with whimsical user names, but personality wise i thought it suited me, and i was looking for something that describes me in a single word.

It probably only works in my own head tho.

Going to do a 2 cents thing here after reading only some of the comments here. First a quick history lesson. Bulldozer was designed back when the market seemed that dips would come off the cpu and be processed only in the gpu. From there the engineers considered how the parallel world would work as well. This lead to the design choice of the more core the better but sharing the cache could make things quicker just like in threading with intel.

Now fast forward to today, and the market has not dramatically changed from 5 years ago as far ad programs. Actually it has become more paralleled with heavy fpu, pretty much making Intel corner the market in desktop and Llano cornering the low end.

So in essence bd did not fail, but looking at future market failed. Amd tried to fix the problem but didnt, and they tried to short cut by automatting which is a big no no in the cpu world. At least for amd and intel, it can work in the lower ends like microcontrollers.

IT something to look at and think about where cops could end up. Also we are finally seeing a contender to the ht system from intel.

Again, how was windows 7 made for SB? ?

if thatw as the case, phenom's would perform poorly aswell, but they dont, because BD performance has NOTHING to do with the OS on it.

sounds like a cop out instead of accepting BD was a failure more or less, more power, less performance or equal to a 2-3 year old arcitecture...

Mr.Guvernment said:

Again, how was windows 7 made for SB? ?

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Relax Dude, the point has been made, no one is perfect, people read things that may well be wrong. Life goes on. No need to keep harping on about it....

To often what started out as a perfectly pleasant discussion is turned poisonous by someone in the Intel camp, i would rather eat my own spleen then be in any way associated with that.

I built a 2500K system for my brother in law as it was his money and i did not want him to experience people jumping up and down on him for seemingly making the wrong choices!, is it fast? yes, does it run well? yes, was it easy to overclock? yes. was it fun? no..... to easy, 4.5Ghz with almost no challenges.

Is it in any way much better then my Phenom? no, do i regret not going Intel instead? no.

They both have there strong points and weak points, its like PC vs MAC, they are different, its about personal preferences, its about what one wants from there computer.

Nothing to do with being naive or someones punch bag.

Let us all just be happy with what choices we make and get along, what do you think?

Frakk said:

That's uncanny, how did you guess?

I thought the new one was quite good, a bit slow in places but well written, directed and so on...

The truth is i'm not much good with whimsical user names, but personality wise i thought it suited me, and i was looking for something that describes me in a single word.

It probably only works in my own head tho.

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I thought the first two seasons were awesome, but like most shows started going downhill in season 3.

As for the x86 performance crown, my understranding is that was the whole purpose of Bulldozer anyway. Get better performance per transistor (which they didn't pull off due to their fab process) and shunt a lot of the work off to the GPU component.... Piledriver will improve x86 a bit, but its the next gen APU's in 2013 I'm waiting for, mind you, with AMD's execution history I think 2014-2015 is more likely. The question is will it be enough to compete with what Intel has with native x86 at that time?

Dolk said:

Going to do a 2 cents thing here after reading only some of the comments here. First a quick history lesson. Bulldozer was designed back when the market seemed that dips would come off the cpu and be processed only in the gpu. From there the engineers considered how the parallel world would work as well. This lead to the design choice of the more core the better but sharing the cache could make things quicker just like in threading with intel.

Now fast forward to today, and the market has not dramatically changed from 5 years ago as far ad programs. Actually it has become more paralleled with heavy fpu, pretty much making Intel corner the market in desktop and Llano cornering the low end.

So in essence bd did not fail, but looking at future market failed. Amd tried to fix the problem but didnt, and they tried to short cut by automatting which is a big no no in the cpu world. At least for amd and intel, it can work in the lower ends like microcontrollers.

IT something to look at and think about where cops could end up. Also we are finally seeing a contender to the ht system from intel.

Click to expand...

Perhaps, however GPU's are strong on FP performance. I'm thinking that with the next gen APU's Integer performance will be all that counts on the x86 side whereas FP will be shunted off to the GPU component of the core.... Mind you, AMD needs to improve their integer performance somewhat for this to work. They're talking about their next gen GPU's being able to talk native x86 language so with any luck software won't even need to be recompiled to make use of the cores.

To me it looks like they're getting all the pieces in place for the future, but its not doing them any favours with the current market. These are interim products which will eventually be integrated as part of a much stronger product. Their main goal is getting transistor count down, this however needs to be hand crafted. The only thing that they still have in development is the GPU component.

I may just be spouting BS here, though this is what I believe they're trying to do. Mind you, if the board keeps swapping CEO's because of short term performance then this long term goal may never happen..... Of course, the company need to survive long enough to pull off their goals too, so who knows?

mjw21a said:

I thought the first two seasons were awesome, but like most shows started going downhill in season 3.

As for the x86 performance crown, my understranding is that was the whole purpose of Bulldozer anyway. Get better performance per transistor (which they didn't pull off due to their fab process) and shunt a lot of the work off to the GPU component.... Piledriver will improve x86 a bit, but its the next gen APU's in 2013 I'm waiting for, mind you, with AMD's execution history I think 2014-2015 is more likely. The question is will it be enough to compete with what Intel has with native x86 at that time?



Perhaps, however GPU's are strong on FP performance. I'm thinking that with the next gen APU's Integer performance will be all that counts on the x86 side whereas FP will be shunted off to the GPU component of the core.... Mind you, AMD needs to improve their integer performance somewhat for this to work.

To me it looks like they're getting all the pieces in place for the future, but its not doing them any favours with the current market. These are interim products which will eventually be integrated as part of a much stronger product. Their main goal is getting transistor count down, this however needs to be hand crafted.

Click to expand...

Yeah who knows, its clear they have chosen a path, maybe they see something coming in the way things work that we don't?

We can only hope they get it into gear fast and that Piledriver washes away all of BD's current sins.