I am guessing Vishera will be the last CPU AMD makes with Global Foundaries. This is Piledriver. With Roughly 15% increase in IPC, and clocks that go as high as 5.4+ Ghz at 10 cores, this will result in an overall performance gain of 40% or so in highly threaded applications. In single core performance, we will only see around 15-20% benefit from current bulldozer offerings which still will not beat Phenom II core Ghz per Ghz, but will wipe the floor with it on highly threaded applications. If a 4.8 Ghz FX core is roughly the performance of a 4.1 Ghz Phenom core, A 5.4 Ghz Vishera core wi atleast perform as good as a 4.4 Ghz Phenom Core. If a Phenom II X6 scales as 5.9, and FX scales as 6.66 , Vishera will scale as roughly 8.3. We can already see that AMD chose not to continue with K10.5 Arch because Bulldozer is headed in the right direction. By the time Vishera is released (Q4/ 2012 ,Q1 2013), most games will take advantage of more than 4 cores.
Ivy bridge on the other hand is said to bring a performance increase of 20-25% overall, with higher overclockability - I am guessing 5.0-5.4 range as with Vishera. Scaling might increase, but even then we can see that even then, intel's mainstream offering will begin to lag behind AMD in highly threaded applications; scaling for the 2600k is 4.87, so mainstream ivy bridge will be around this. I am guessing intel will stay with four cores for mainstream until late in Haswell, but we know that ivy bridge extreme will sport 6 and 8 cores. Intel's current flagship the 3960x scales as 7.23 , and the 2600k scales as 4.87. This implies that an eight core i7 extreme edition ivy bridge will scale as 9.64, which is well above Vishera's scaling of 8.3.
Of course this is all speculation
gloflo are set up and have the experience for CPU's where as TSMC make GPU's, i guess thats why TSMC got the APU contract as its essentially a hot-wired GPU.
Now the thing about the FX-8 and its efficiency is somewhat misunderstood, the thing really does have 8 processor cores in it, (tho not here) some like to argue its like a SB in that it has 4 module and 8 threads, they forget that BD-8 has 2 cores per module, 2x 4 cores = 8 cores, SB has 1 core per module and 4 module, 1x 4 = 4.
Something that has twice the number of cores is going to suck up a lot more power and produce a lot more heat, BD is no where near twice as power hungry as SB nor does it create a massive amount more heat.
All things considered (8 cores) the efficiency of its design is actually quite decent.
If you look at the FX-4100 (which has 4 cores) will clock to 5Ghz on hair without much hassle.
Asking 4 core comparable efficiency from an 8 core is a big ask.
AMD are obsessed with cramming as many cores as possible onto a single DIE, they want 10 cores on there next mainstream CPU, why? how multithreaded do they think APP's are going to get?
I'm one of a group of coders who have spent the last 2+ years coding a new type of software, we are coding for 4 threads which puts it very much in the minority and the reason for that i can tell you is because it is easier just to make do with 1 or 2.
Intel have judged the market much better and stuck to to making each Core more efficient, as opposed to the entire CPU as a whole.
BD may well crush a 2600K if it was using all 8 of its cores simultaneously, the problem is there is nothing which will ask it to do that, having said that with only one cache line for 2 cores that must surely create a bottle-neck eventually.
As for PD's predicted performance improvements? don't hold your hopes up
@ salsoul
Here's a Thuban / entry level Corsair RAM memory performance perspective. (3.8Ghz)
