Bulldozer is here.. how Dissapointing

[Dorsilfin]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007671%2050001028%20600213781&IsNodeId=1&name=Socket%20AM3%2b

After all that wait.. they are power hungry and are only benchmarking around the 2600k's which are quad's with hyperthreading..

*sigh*

[DrPop]

Ah, even I, ever the optimist, am struggling for positive outlook on this! :p
EDIT: Just looked at Anandtech's article on it...lame. Just lame. Thoroughly unimpressed. Looks like I will have this PhenomII X6 for quite some time now...

On a side note, I wonder if as the technology matures, they can get the clock speed up, and that will help their benchies?

[Fire$torm]

When I saw the title for this thread I couldn't help but chuckle..... Sorry bout that :P

More then likely this first branch of the Bulldozer family is for the early adopters so that AMD can recoup some of their R&D costs.
It's a fair bet that 2nd and 3rd gen Bulldozer will smoke what AMD is currently pushing (As in street hustling) on the market.

Just look at this as a Beta release....... :P

[zombie67]

Haven't taken the time to read the articles (sorry). What about the cost comparison? Maybe they are so damn cheap that they are attractive?

[Beerdrinker]

Well I for one were really looking forward to the Bulldozer, since I am saving pennies for my next upgrade. And I had hoped to go on a 8-core Bulldozer by then...Guess I got some reading to do before heading out on the market..:)

[DrPop]

It's not a bad chip, it's just not the knock out that many of us were hoping for. If they price it right, then it may actually be competitive. All depends on how it stacks up to Intel's offering at the same price. ;)

[rgathright]

Well I for one were really looking forward to the Bulldozer, since I am saving pennies for my next upgrade. And I had hoped to go on a 8-core Bulldozer by then...Guess I got some reading to do before heading out on the market..:)

I make no apologies for AMD on this one, this is all just an EPICFAIL on their part.

Still, we have yet to see any benchies for the AMD Opteron 6272. I hope that the 16 core variant of the 1st gen Bulldozer will be slightly faster so I can upgrade my ASUS KGPE-D16.

Did anyone else know that the AMD Opteron 6272 16 core Socket G34 is supposed to be $593 or a little more?

[DrPop]

Now this [Hitler video] is some funny stuff! Click the linky and make sure you're sitting down!!! :)) :D
Edit: now that I watch the whole thing, I must apologize, the language is so foul. But ... it is still hilarious in a sad way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SArxcnpXStE

[Dorsilfin]

This is such a major let down.. when im bored at work and start piecing together pc builds... i've started putting intel boards and cpus ... :/

now granted thats a long ways away from buying intel again.. but bah humbug.. I really wanted a Win with bulldozer..


the benchmarks paint a sad picture.. Needing to be 1ghz overclocked just to come on par with a year and a half old 2600k.. I mean.. Common now. And sure sure talk of it being great with windows 8.. when the F is that happening.. surely not tomorrow..

Im not going to get my hopes up again.. Just that.. next round of processors better be amazing.. or DIRT Cheap, or im gonna start ponying up the bigger bucks for intel builds..

thats a sad statement considering ive been building AMD Only builds since 2000, over 8 years and I cant even count how many of thousands of dollars ive blown building them.


..

I suppose I might just buy a new case for my beast and add another 590 or two and make an amazing watercooling build to bide my time this winter.. i havnt quite decided..

Anyone see anything that shows promise with these chips? I want to just think maybe someone hasnt found where it shines yet..

[DrPop]

OK, you know me, Mr. Optimist...I'll bite. ;)
Now, this is a very qualified "yes" and that is...if the rig is to be used almost solely as a 24/7 cruncher; not a gaming rig or for general tasks, but a truly dedicated crunching rig...then I would be somewhat tempted.
Come to think of it, this is the DrPop rig's life now...dedicated cruncher, sitting in the back room. I just might be the nut to buy one of these at some point. Here's why:

Take a look at page 14 and 15 of Tom's Hardware review on it. Very promising stuff for the right crunching load. Particularly on pg 14, a very strong SSE3 performance - nearly equal to Intel's SB 2600K, and even stronger SSE2 perfrimance - besting Intel's SB 2600K, and stomping all over the PhenomII X6 ...where the Bull Dozer has only 4 FPUs vs the PhenomII's 6. That is pretty impressive, actually.
pic of this benchmark: 556

Then on pg 15, check out the Adobe CS 5.1 benchmark. This is one of the few benches they have right now, that will throw 64bit code at every single bit of hardware you give it. Just a grueling crunchiest. And -the Bull Dozer loves it. Walks all over every other CPU, even the excellent Intel SB 22600K.
Pic of this benchmark: 557

To recap, Sandra Benchmark Suite is getting an admittedly incredible 20.66 GFLOPS of FPU performance out of the first round Bull Dozer chip to market. The vaunted Sandy Bridge 2600K, second generation i7? It comes in at 18.14.
That's not something you are hearing bandied about the 'Net right now, because all the enthusiast sites like Anandtech, etc, cater to the 0.7% of the market that are high-end gaming enthusiasts. This is NOT a good chip to get max frame rates out of games with, or do ANY sort of single threaded 32bit processes on.
Bull Dozer is a server style chip, which actually shines when loaded to the hilt with 8 simultaneous 64bit workloads. Hmmm...that sounds an awful lot like some BOINC projects I know! ;)

So there's my take on it after wading through 2 days worth of reading on it and checking all the benches. It is definitely a niche CPU - but some of us may very well be in that niche. It will perform incredibly well in tandem as a multi CPU server part, and Cray has just been awarded a mega-millions contract to supply the first large scale server (we're talking Petaflops here!!!) based on Bull Dozer. They could have chosen Xeon for their design, but they chose Bull Dozer instead. I think Cray knows a thing or two about mega-crunching.

[Beerdrinker]

Well, after scratching my head for some days overhere, I decided to go with the Bulldozer anyway when my turn comes to upgrade. Why?

- Intel for the last 5 years. Wanna try AMD
- 8 cores :p
- Cheaper overall.


Mind you...I am still sitting on LGA775 setup overhere. I need that upgrade. And I am certain that you will agree that I deserve it - wouldn´t you???

[DrPop]

Haha! Of course you "need" the upgrade, Beer! :D Did my analysis of it all make any sense? From what I can see, with the right crunching workloads, it actually might make a good dedicated BOINC rig.

[Fire$torm]

Well, after scratching my head for some days overhere, I decided to go with the Bulldozer anyway when my turn comes to upgrade. Why?

- Intel for the last 5 years. Wanna try AMD
- 8 cores :p
- Cheaper overall.


Mind you...I am still sitting on LGA775 setup overhere. I need that upgrade. And I am certain that you will agree that I deserve it - wouldn´t you???

Of course you deserve it Beer, as long as "She who must be obeyed" says so........ Now it is time for a beer, Beer. :D Cheers!

[Beerdrinker]

Haha! Of course you "need" the upgrade, Beer! :D Did my analysis of it all make any sense? From what I can see, with the right crunching workloads, it actually might make a good dedicated BOINC rig.


Yeah, it did make some sense to me. It annoys me a bit that all the benchmarks always focus on either gaming or video rendering...(or some synthetic "wankermark" I can´t use for s....t) In the past (as in the last time I owned a AMD) I remembered that snappy feeling Windows used to have. And the AMD is not that slow as Intel would like.
Here in Denmark the Intel´s chips are insane exspensive. I can purchase almost a full AMD setup for the cost of one good Intel chip. (board, ram and CPU) and that really appeals to the cheap ass in me. :p

[Dorsilfin]

While they will indeed make a solid cruncher.. have you seen the Watt usage at full load?

252 watts.. thats quite a chunk for just 8 cores.

An I7 2600k is only 166 watts, sure only 4 cores but does have hyper-threading.

and are AMD's cores actually full cores, or just these half cores squished together.

im totally not being optimistic on this chip =o

[DrPop]

im totally not being optimistic on this chip =o

Hehe...you need to watch the Hitler video on it then. Whoever comes up with that stuff is funnier than heck! :D

[Duke of Buckingham]

http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR7GJz3VnCgfhsFTsvK7ltOuTEv6zizO ysFGoGFnOzTNmZiGL04ee4sqlGhrA
Someone called me

[John P. Myers]

To recap, Sandra Benchmark Suite is getting an admittedly incredible 20.66 GFLOPS of FPU performance out of the first round Bull Dozer chip to market. The vaunted Sandy Bridge 2600K, second generation i7? It comes in at 18.14.

ummm...but doesn't the bulldozen have...i don't know...TWICE AS MANY CORES!!! 2 x 18.14 = 20.66? hmmm

and how many watts again?

lol no thanks.

When the 2800K comes out soon, there will be no benchmark remaining in which Bulldozers eeks ahead at all.

And when AMD gets around to releasing better Bulldozers, Intel will have it's LGA 2011's, at 22nm, mind you, something which AMD is not even remotely ready for.

[DrPop]

I'd have to say I fully agree there...someone just wanted anyone to find something it was good at...so I did. ;)
Am I ever going to buy one? I dunno. I might would do it just to see on my 890FX board if they make a BIOS update for it. If they don't, well, that really would take the spizz out of it for me.

[DrPop]

@JPM - I don't think anyone is really happy about it. I mean, I'm definitely not. I was just pointing out that it was quite a feat for the BD, bad as it is, to beat the 2nd gen i7 at FPU performance, and that is with only 4 FPU units, just like the Intel chip. It's apples to apples there, as it has 8 integer "cores", but only 4 for FPU.
It's OK to say that overall, the whole package sucks - but, they did at least one thing pretty good. That's all I was trying to get at.

[rgathright]

Sorry, late to the party... but

Please consider any other motherboard than the Asus Crosshair V Formula. Many hardware reviewers are finding that the Crosshair is not nearly as fast as it could be to a BIOS issue. :-s


Well, after scratching my head for some days overhere, I decided to go with the Bulldozer anyway when my turn comes to upgrade. Why?

- Intel for the last 5 years. Wanna try AMD
- 8 cores :p
- Cheaper overall.


Mind you...I am still sitting on LGA775 setup overhere. I need that upgrade. And I am certain that you will agree that I deserve it - wouldn´t you???

[DrPop]

Oh man, seriously? That is not what AMD needed - the first reviews to come out even more poorly due to mobo problems. Hmmm...I wonder how much % improvement we can expect with a fixed BIOS?

Although, to be honest, anything they can do to "fix up" Bulldozer is going to be too little too late in many ways, unless they really come down on price.
Check this out about Ivy Bridge in Q4 2011 (http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ivy-bridge-processor-release-22nm-3d-transistor,13753.html)! I think Intel is just going to steam roller them into the ground unless a huge company like Apple or IBM or something steps in and helps AMD. Of course, half AMD's battle is always Global Foundries can't get their crap together and poor yields, etc, but still - Intel's momentum at this point is staggering.

[John P. Myers]

I don't think that Apple has the expertise to assist with chip designs anymore. They've kinda shifted their focus from high-tech to highly-aesthetic :/ and IBM is busy with their own processors. Ever since they helped design the CPU for the PlayStation 3, the Cell architecture has really taken off for them. Other than continuing to play catch-up, i dunno what other options AMD really has...

Edit: Well there is this: AMD 7000 series GPUs (http://www.legitreviews.com/news/11674/)

If they actually use XDR2, i really hope Nvidia does too or they'll never keep up.

[Fire$torm]

I don't think that Apple has the expertise to assist with chip designs anymore. They've kinda shifted their focus from high-tech to highly-aesthetic :/ and IBM is busy with their own processors. Ever since they helped design the CPU for the PlayStation 3, the Cell architecture has really taken off for them. Other than continuing to play catch-up, i dunno what other options AMD really has...

Edit: Well there is this: AMD 7000 series GPUs (http://www.legitreviews.com/news/11674/)

If they actually use XDR2, i really hope Nvidia does too or they'll never keep up.

It looks like AMD's Next-Gen GPU will be delayed ---> http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/graphics/display/20111102232939_Report_AMD_s_Next_Gen_GPU_to_Boost_ Performance_by_Two_Times_Will_Be_Delayed.html

[Mike029]

It looks like AMD's Next-Gen GPU will be delayed ---> http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/graphics/display/20111102232939_Report_AMD_s_Next_Gen_GPU_to_Boost_ Performance_by_Two_Times_Will_Be_Delayed.html

This means no price drop for the current crop of gpu's. No newer tech to push down the price.:(

[DrPop]

Why does it seem that every time they go to release a new architecture, they have these issues with their foundries? I would think it's time to renegotiate a contract or step up to IBM and say we need some help or something...the company needs help and it is now going to lose a bunch of Christmas sales it could have had. :(

[John P. Myers]

Why does it seem that every time they go to release a new architecture, they have these issues with their foundries? I would think it's time to renegotiate a contract or step up to IBM and say we need some help or something...the company needs help and it is now going to lose a bunch of Christmas sales it could have had. :(

Intel has it's own foundries. AMD should too, but they don't. I can understand GPUs not having their own foundries, but CPUs really should. Nvidia just released a quad-core processor for tablets and other mobile devices btw. the Tegra 3. That's gonna hurt AMD even more.

Edit: Tegra 3 (http://forums.legitreviews.com/about37871.html) The way they talk about the performance of the Tegra 3, and the fact that ASUS has already gobbled them up by the ton, someone (intel? amd? both?) has lost a huge chunk of marketshare. Intel can handle the loss. Amd though...break out the skates

[John P. Myers]

And more bad news for AMD: Intel had 75.8% of PC CPU market in Q3 (http://forums.legitreviews.com/about37708.html)