http://blogs.amd.com/play/2011/10/13/our-take-on-amd-fx/In our design considerations, AMD focused on applications and environments that we believe our customers use and which we expect them to use in the future. The architecture focuses on high-frequency and resource sharing to achieve optimal throughput and speed in next generation applications and high-resolution gaming.
Heres some example scenarios where the AMD FX processor shines:
Playing the Latest Games
A perfect example is Battlefield 3. Take a look at how our test of AMD FX CPU compared to the Core i7 2600K and AMD Phenom II X6 1100T processors at full settings:
Map Resolution AMD FX-8150 Sandy Bridge i7 2600k AMD Phenom II X6 1100T
MP_011 1650x1080x32 max settings 39.3 37.5 36.3
MP_011 1920x1200x32 max settings 33.2 31.8 30.6
MP_011 2560x1600x32 max settings 21.4 20.4 19.9
Benchmarking done with a single AMD Radeon HD 6970 graphics card
What, you weren't expecting them to go "netflix" on you and dump qwikster (bulldozer) just because it's off to a rocky start, did ya?
AMD has to address the performance of their product - be that its pricing, its computational capabilities, or its power-consumption - any company will do that after releasing a product.
What I want to see are more apps that showcase and take advantage the CMT architecture of BD. They had four years to get everything lined up, where are the apps?
This has AMD and GPGPU written all over it, which makes me sad. AMD can't just rely on a "once we build it, they might come" philosophy to software development
I really expected them to coordinate the release of Zambezi with that of patch updates to key productivity software like Photoshop, TMPGEnc transcoders, etc.
This is AMD's way though, always has been, but it is to their own detriment because the competition doesn't use the same playbook. (neither Nvidia nor Intel)
It wouldn't be the first time AMD has needed software to fix a hardware performance issue.
What's next? Randomly showing pics of sexy half-naked chicks holding their CPU's?
What's next? Randomly showing pics of sexy half-naked chicks holding their CPU's?
What's next? Randomly showing pics of sexy half-naked chicks holding their CPU's?
:hmm: I'm failing to see the downside here, regardless the performance of whatever is being held...nothing but profit
:hmm: I'm failing to see the downside here, regardless the performance of whatever is being held...nothing but profit
Does that mean we can start a Bulldozer babe thread here now ?
Clearly Expectations have exceeded Reality.
The minimum everyone had the right to ask of BD was to clearly be a better option than Phenom II, either by sheer performance, bang/buck, performance/watt, a combination of the mentioned characteristics or others.
For the desktop user, overall, it isn't.
And the baffling part is that this processor is a monster in die size and transistor count. If the performance was at least in-line with it (when compared at a minimum with Deneb/Thuban) while power consumption and/or cost were high, it could be understandable - the manufacturing process simply wasn't adequate like (and to break the mold of car analogies) the jet fighters developed/produced during the WWII that were inferior to propeller aircrafts mostly due to the manufacturing not be advanced enough to build jet engines.
Or if it was a tiny chip with a low transistor count that had this performance but dirty cheap, that would make sense as well.
Some expectations were surely crazy, although it is always good when human imagination and ingenuity can create something out of spit and wire, but expecting BD to be an overall better buy than Phenom II cannot be deemed as unrealistic.
To the question "why didn't AMD shrunk Deneb/Thuban instead" the answer seems to be "they did", but Llano doesn't seem to be that good OC (power draw doesn't seem to be that good either when OC) nor does the performance of Deneb/Thuban/Llano seems to scale that great with higher.
The only good things (might be an exaggeration but please read it as a figure of speech) out of BD is that the performance seems to scale better with higher clocks than Phenom II and the architecture is performing so bad in so many ways that it seems to be ample room to improve (this doesn't turn BD in a good buy however).