AMD's Bulldozer a bust

What did AMD do to make Intel create SNB and IB? You're joking, right?

Yeah, I forgot about nForce chipsets - may as well burn your money for all the productivity you'd get out of one of those.

 

Funny, though, the nForce2 Athlon Thunderbird board I owned way back when was a pinnacle of reliability and performance. Probably my favorite of all time in the desktop space, Intel 440BX excepted (which was in an old Compaq I had when I started college in 90s).

 

The Thunderbird core Athlons predated Nvidia's nForce2 chipset by 2-3 years. For Athlons it was Thunderbird, Palomino, and Thoroughbred/Barton. For me too though socket A with nForce2 was the pinnacle of awesomeness. My DFI motherboard, Athlon XP, and Winbond CH-5 was my favorite setup of all time. Even at that time though, AMD's Athlon lagged behind Intel's P4. The Athlon 64 was a monumental leap forward though and Intel was playing catchup for a couple of years.

 

Or this one for $300 less and HD 6650 (pretty much same as your K53TA).

ASUS A53TA-XE2 Laptop Computer - AMD Quad-Core A6-3400M 1.4GHz, 4GB DDR3, 500GB HDD, DVDRW, 15.6 Display, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, Brown, 1-Year Warranty / 1-Year Accidental Damage at TigerDirect.com

Also, I never experienced these AMD instabilities either. I have three Athlon64 X2 machines running at my home currently (two HTPC's, one in my WHS), as well as an old Sempron 2400+ machine, AMD Llano laptop and Brazos netbook. Although Core 2 Quad was my gaming box for years, and my current gaming box is also Intel, only because it fit my needs/budget/performance. But I have complete confidence that AMD will work just fine if I decide on them in the future.

Bulldozer is a bit of a disappointment. But really looking forward to Trinity Q2 next year for an inexpensive but powerful laptop.

 

No that quad from AMD blows. You cannot compare it to a i7, and it will even have a hard time competing with a i5.
Reviews of the Llano showed that the turbo properties of the chip pretty much sucks. If you want something that is equal to the high end i5s, you need the 3510/30MX, which I reckon cost a bit more?

 

I consider myself a realist.

I wasn't even looking for BD to beat Intel.
I just wanted a "solid alternative" to the $220 i5 2500K.
It didn't have to beat it.. just "close the gap" that Sandy Bridge had opened up between Intel and AMD.

In most applications, the best BD cannot even keep up with the 2500K... and its more expensive!
At this point, I wouldn't even pay $200 for an 8-core BD.

Not being able to keep up with their own previous-gen chips in a wide-variety of applications is also quite a let-down for AMD.

Honestly, there is still a place for PhenomII and AthlonII processors as you can get them and the previous-gen motherboards for VERY affordable prices... and they are more than fast enough to get the job done... you just must understand that the whole Sandy Bridge line (yes apparently even the $120 stock-clocked i3) is better than your OC'd 3.8GHz Phenom for most games.

I cannot see the BD line catching on in laptops at all... they run hot and are expensive.

I DO see BD being useful in an Opteron server-class environment which is more likely to make use of the additional cores.

AMD needs to drop some prices and get some value from this release of BD Desktop release and then put their nose to the grindstone and build a better per-core processor.

Even Intel fanboys should want this... or Intel will continue to sit on their thumbs and sell the old stuff because they CAN.

 

If by a bit more you mean like $50-$70 then ok, it's a bit more. In the HP DV6z, 3530MX is $100 more upgrade over stock A6-3400m, and with typical discounts brings that down to about $60-$70. They can all overclock to almost the same speeds, from A6-3400m to A8-3530MX, so best to get the slowest CPU and save some money. Only advantage of the MX is ability to run 1600MHz DDR3, but there is little benefit to that other than slight IGP improvement. In any case, you can overclock AND unvervolt the Llano like crazy. Many are driving them to 2.4 to 2.6GHz without much problem, which puts it up there with a mobile i5 for dual threaded apps, and better for three or four threaded apps because it has dedicated four cores.

Turbo does stink in the LLano though, but considering I'm running fixed speed 2.4GHz @ 1.1V compared with stock 1.8GHz @ 1.05V, I'd say it's a pretty good overclocker. I can even run 2.6GHz if needed, but depending on the game, temps can get quite toasty (i.e. 90C) and starts to throttle, but at 2.4GHz I can run < 75C usually worse case scenario.

 

lol when in doubt, overclock.
Didn`t know that 3530MX was only $100 more though. Cheap chips for shure.

And I thought that MX (45W) could overclock/turbo better than the 35W like 3400M.

 

too bad the ATi trademark does not exist anymore.

 

Well I had both the Asus K53TA (A6-3400m) and DV6z (A8-3530MX) at the same time. I could run the A6 at 2.4GHz and the A8 at 2.5GHz. The A8 has a higher voltage potential, but since they all overclock at much lower than stock voltage, it doesn't matter much. Not to mention Llano chips seems to sky rocket in temps with speeds at 2.6GHz or higher. Although 3.0GHz seemed to be unachievable by anyone, while some were able to get 2.8GHz with the 3530MX, I don't think it was sustainable for any length of time without throttling (i.e. temps > 90C).

I ended up returning the Asus for the HP, but had to exchange the HP because it was running hotter than others machines as reported here in the NBR HP forums. But you can see my cooling mod in my link below. Now running 2.4GHz < 75C, can go 2.5GHz if I want, but 2.6GHz, temps start to increase, although with the mod I could probably run at 85C if I really needed the extra oomph.

 

The A8's are supposed to be in the $700 or less price segment. Ticks me off to see so many models go for more than that.
A6 is supposed to be in the $600 or less segment, and A4 $500 or less. This was in an Anandtech article when talking with AMD about the release of Llano, those are the target prices.

 

Yeah and that's why there's no AMD Android tablets or smart phones, heck NVIDIA has been all over this cow for pretty long now and they're not even a CPU company. AMD's got both the CPU and GPU (sorry called APU now) resources to jump and this market and explode with success since the market does not require very fast CPU's anyway, isn't that what AMD does best; bring in a lot of cores and a APU for the win!

 

I root hard for AMD so it's a bit disappointing to see Bulldozer not perform very well or even fall behind Phenom II in certain tests.

I read an AMD statement about Bulldozer being fully utilized in Windows 8. While I hope that the next Windows can bring out the best in this CPU lineup, what difference can it actually make?

Aside from the Metro UI, Win8 seems to have much of the core functionality as Win7. I could be wrong. Most of the differences I've seen between the two versions have been in things like ribbon bars for explorer.

Windows 8 would have to be extremely efficient to reduce Bulldozer's power consumption and heat. If that happens, then combined with performance and price it could be a solid option.

One other thought is that this summer Microsoft and Intel had a public breakup over Windows 8 being designed for ARM platforms in addition to x86. Maybe Microsoft will now work a little more closely with AMD to help them optimize their processors for Windows?

 

There are no AMD android tablets because AMD makes x86 processors, not ARM. The same with Intel. There have been several AMD based tablets however. The Acer Iconia Tab for instance.

 

Yeah but it's not a comparison because Intel is doing well on both desktop and laptop processor not too mention GPU (if you even call the HD 3000 a GPU), Intel's onboard GPU has the highest market share on laptops, they don't need ARM ATM.

Where as AMD is not doing so well on both desktop and laptop processor, although I think Llano has really gave them a another chance on laptops. On a side note, AMD does sell discrete Radeons really well both on the desktops and laptops. What I mean is AMD should try something new to expand their overall market share which does not all about Windows and OSX anymore.

Whatever, the Xbox 360 and Wii still doing very well...I'm out, you Win.

 

I agree. I was a HUGE AMD desktop nerd from the K6-2 through the Athlon64 and I have NEVER heard of or experienced anything like what tilleroftheearth is talking about.

 

Likewise. I used a K6 (not sure what exactly the model was), Athlon 64 3800+, and Phenom II X4 965 (I think that's the model) and never once have I had a problem with Windows that I could trace back to the CPU. x86 is x86, doesn't really matter if Intel of AMD (or Via) makes it, it'll run. Maybe he was having problems with a specific subset of features (like visualization)?

 

AMD is not dead, they just aren't competitive on the high end. Hardly matters, since all the money is on the low end.

If you're going to spend less than $150 on a processor, AMD is a great choice for desktops. AMD's Llano is a great choice for laptops, because their graphics performance is so high compared to Intel, and they aren't expensive.

Bulldozer may very well have been uninspiring, I didn't look into it too much since I'm still happy with a high end phenom ii x4.

 

the last time i had amd in any computer was a desktop FX-57 CPU. It was the best available desktop CPU for gaming back then.

i think that woke intel up and i don't think they have looked back since. I've had intel in my computers since.

i think that Bulldozer is somewhat of a disappointment considering how late it was released.

But the next gen "Piledriver" CPu might be a little more competitive with Intel, but only time will tell

 

AMD just need to do the equivalent of what intel did when they developed the Core2 line of processors. If it weren't for Core2 then intel wouldn't be where they are now (not to say they wouldn't be doing well though).

 

The reason behind this is that each BD Unit consists of 2 processing cores that share a single L2 cache. E.G. in an 4 Core chip, cores 1 & 2 will share a single L2 cache and 3 & 4 will share one as well. Win 7 is not aware of this architectural consideration, but Win 8 will be.

A performance benefit can be achieved when multiple threads within a single process are placed on threads that share a cache. Since threads within a single process will likely access the same set of in-memory data, if they don't share a cache, then an extra step must be taken to write through changes from one cache to the other whenever a value is updated.

Win 7 will assign the thread to whichever core is the least busy at the moment. Win 8 will balance that consideration against advantages of shared cache access. Using our example above, unless a process is maxing out multiple cores its threads are likely going to be scheduled on Cores 1 & 2, or 3 & 4 but not a mixture of the two groups.

 

The Win8 stuff is just plain wishful thinking.

Tom's Hardware tested Win8.
While Win8 does help, it isn't much of a difference.

The result was ever-so-slightly better which still isn't good enough in the vast majority of applications.

The sad part? A stock-clocked 4-core $220 chip based upon a year-old design is faster than AMD's newest an fastest (that costs 20%+ more) in almost every application. On the rare few the older and cheaper chip actually loses, it isn't by much.

AMD not only doesn't own the performance crown, but is geting killed in the price/performance ring in both the high-end and middle-of-the-road markets.

They aren't even really clearly winning the low-end as the i3 is a solid competitor.

 

The major problem here is not that it doesn't beat Sandy Bridge -- the latter is Intel's most rapid architectural advance since Core 2 -- but Bulldozer's performance per watt (or rather, lack thereof). Llano's successor (Trinity) is supposed to be based on Piledriver, the next iteration of this architecture. I am sure that AMD will chop off the cache and otherwise optimize for power efficiency, but if Bulldozer is what they're starting with, they've got a long road ahead of them.

 

Bulldozer does have awful power consumption, but that's when you start ramping up the frequency. At lower frequencies 2-3ghz, power consumption isn't as bad which might provide a glimmer of hope for piledriver.

 

If it's anything like Llano, the stock voltages are WAY higher than they need to be and should be able to scale back. I mean heck I can knock of 0.1V easily from all my P-state voltages and still run stable, but drop several deg C not to mention power consumption.

 

HTWingNut, it's the same with my Athlon II netbook. I can knock off .15 volts from the processor and .1 volts from the chipset, and I haven't actually tried seeing if I can go any lower.

 

I have not seen anyone trying to undervolt Bulldozer. Most people are trying to overclock it and, unlike Llano, you can't do both at the same time. To get a meaningful overclock (i.e. beyond the Turbo range), the voltage has to be increased by quite a bit.

 

Analyzing Bulldozer: Why AMD’s chip is so disappointing
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/100583-analyzing-bulldozers-scaling-single-thread-performance

 

Wow notice a rep from AMD posts in the comments and is not happy!

 

Love how he claims that Bulldozer was meant to complete against the i5 all along, instead of actually aiming for the i7.

 

Here's a leaked slide about Trinity. Obviously, all such material should be taken with a large grain of salt, but this Turkish site is generally pretty accurate on AMD products.

In case people were wondering how AMD was going to stuff a revised version of this furnace into a laptop: notice that the slide says "Up to quad core". This sounds the same as Llano, but what it actually means is that you get two Bulldozer modules. A module is not quite equivalent to two Phenom II cores -- the 8 "core" desktop Bulldozer only slightly outperforms the 6 core Phenom II. They're promising a 20% improvement over Llano, but I suspect this will only be in some workloads and not others.

 

Where I work (for two more days anyway) we have built all out db servers out of AMD 12 core Magny Cours for the last couple of years and the scalability of a 4 socket x 12 core machine was unmatched by the Nehalem based dual socket Intel machines. However, with the new 4 socket E7 x 10 core Xeons that just came out this year, Intel is beating our old AMD machines handily. for only a few threads they're pretty close, but as we go past 20 or 30 threads, and on to 100 or so, the Intels are about 2 to 3 times as fast now. that's huge.

 

Funny to see the AMD rep claiming the 8150 competing with the i5.

That would make more sense if it were PRICED like an i5.

The i5 2500K is $215 at newegg

The FX 8150 is at $269.99 at Amazon (cheapest)
(Newegg lists at $279.99 but its out of stock)

 

yeah they should lower prices on the upper tier cpu's , maybe ill snag one