Perhaps the term "defense" isn't the most accurate, but after reading through numerous reviews it does seem apparent to me that Bulldozer isn't getting the reception AMD may have hoped for and most of it lies at the feet of AMD's marketing department.
What we, as enthusiasts, need to keep in mind is that AMD has long wanted to include some form of SMT (simultaneous multithreading) on it's chips for a while. Intel has long had HT and while Intel and AMD have a cross licensing agreement that allows any technology developed by one of them to be used by the other, AMD wanted to differentiate it's processor from Intel's by developing it's own SMT technology.
Bulldozer, is the culmination of that technology. While the AMD marketing machine wanted to establish a competitive marketing edge by counting each ALU as a separate core, they didn't do the processor nor the company as a whole any favors. AMD marketing beat it into our heads so thoroughly that these were 4 module 8 core processors that every review out their parroted the official company line without any critical thinking of their own.
If we look at the Phenom 2 architecture or the Core i architecture, we see that each core of either processor is composed of 3 ALU's and a FPU, in the Core i all 3 ALU's are capable of integer math and 1 of the ALU's is also used for Boolean comparisons (if/else, yes/no, that sort of thing).
Bulldozer, AMD analyzed their Phenom design and discovered that under most workloads only 2 ALU's were being used, with the 3rd barely being touched, so they dropped the 3rd ALU.
If we apply the same standard to Bulldozer as we do to both the Phenom 2 and Core i processors we see that a processor like the FX 8150 is really a quad core processor that has SMT capabilities. Following this logic the FX 6100 becomes a tri-core with SMT and the 4100 becomes a dual core with SMT.
When viewed in the correct way, without AMD marketing departments B.S. the Bulldozer doesn't look like such a failure, it stops looking like an 8 core that can barely beat AMD's older hexa core and Intel's quad core and instead becomes AMD's SMT capable quad core that is as fast or faster than their older 6 core and can keep up with Intel's quad cores.
In that regard, the Bulldozer becomes a winner.
Of course, once we factor in the price and the TDP, that skews our view again, but at least it's not the benchmarks that have us gagging.
I'm also of the firm belief that the true power of Bulldozer hasn't been shown in the benchmarks done so far, because benchmarks like Cinebench 11.5 default to spawning a number of threads equal to the number of cores and the x264 benchmark uses the threads = auto switch.
I'm fairly certain that of if Cinbench were rerun with the thread count manually set in the preferences to 12 or 16 threads, that the FX8150 might pull ahead of it's competitors; likewise I would be willing to bet if the benchmarking script of x264 benchmark were modified so that threads = auto read threads = 16 or 24, that the FX8150 may just surprise a few people.
Anyway, just some thoughts I wanted to share.
What we, as enthusiasts, need to keep in mind is that AMD has long wanted to include some form of SMT (simultaneous multithreading) on it's chips for a while. Intel has long had HT and while Intel and AMD have a cross licensing agreement that allows any technology developed by one of them to be used by the other, AMD wanted to differentiate it's processor from Intel's by developing it's own SMT technology.
Bulldozer, is the culmination of that technology. While the AMD marketing machine wanted to establish a competitive marketing edge by counting each ALU as a separate core, they didn't do the processor nor the company as a whole any favors. AMD marketing beat it into our heads so thoroughly that these were 4 module 8 core processors that every review out their parroted the official company line without any critical thinking of their own.
If we look at the Phenom 2 architecture or the Core i architecture, we see that each core of either processor is composed of 3 ALU's and a FPU, in the Core i all 3 ALU's are capable of integer math and 1 of the ALU's is also used for Boolean comparisons (if/else, yes/no, that sort of thing).
Bulldozer, AMD analyzed their Phenom design and discovered that under most workloads only 2 ALU's were being used, with the 3rd barely being touched, so they dropped the 3rd ALU.
If we apply the same standard to Bulldozer as we do to both the Phenom 2 and Core i processors we see that a processor like the FX 8150 is really a quad core processor that has SMT capabilities. Following this logic the FX 6100 becomes a tri-core with SMT and the 4100 becomes a dual core with SMT.
When viewed in the correct way, without AMD marketing departments B.S. the Bulldozer doesn't look like such a failure, it stops looking like an 8 core that can barely beat AMD's older hexa core and Intel's quad core and instead becomes AMD's SMT capable quad core that is as fast or faster than their older 6 core and can keep up with Intel's quad cores.
In that regard, the Bulldozer becomes a winner.
Of course, once we factor in the price and the TDP, that skews our view again, but at least it's not the benchmarks that have us gagging.
I'm also of the firm belief that the true power of Bulldozer hasn't been shown in the benchmarks done so far, because benchmarks like Cinebench 11.5 default to spawning a number of threads equal to the number of cores and the x264 benchmark uses the threads = auto switch.
I'm fairly certain that of if Cinbench were rerun with the thread count manually set in the preferences to 12 or 16 threads, that the FX8150 might pull ahead of it's competitors; likewise I would be willing to bet if the benchmarking script of x264 benchmark were modified so that threads = auto read threads = 16 or 24, that the FX8150 may just surprise a few people.
Anyway, just some thoughts I wanted to share.