In defense of "Bulldozer"

[qliveur]

Why are people defending this piece of crap?

 

[aigomorla]

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.

the problem is this.

ES leaks typically allows members to see what the cpu is able to do.

ES leaks then allow the general public to decide where the cpu belongs.

When ES leak happens at intel, they dont go around telling everyone its fake, unless its a cpu which is never suposed to be released.

This allows us... the people buying the cpu to asses where the cpu should fit and belong.

What has AMD done?
They didnt allow us any chance to niche the cpu realistically.
Instead they wanted us to niche it with all the top dogs.
And to make us want it more, they tried to hide the real performance on the cpu.

yes its a marketing F up... and well... someone has to pay for it... and when the consumer does because marketing tried to spice up something sour, well, tough luck....

Had AMD just shut up about the leaks.... not deny them, so people could of had a better ballpark on where to niche the cpu, then the launch would of been better.

Why? because the AMD supporters would find programs to run, and show its a great cpu.
Instead, you got the people thinking AMD is correct, and reviewers are lying... and when the cpu is run on a WRONG program, and fails horribly..
ONCE again... TOUGH LUCK.. its the grave u dug. period.

 

[NIGELG]

Or maybe even Electronic Arts.

Seriously though, software companies should stick with software. Unless they've already proven themselves with both hardware and software.

Or maybe Nvidia?

 

[Keysplayr]

Or maybe Nvidia?

Don't know if you're being cute or not, but no. I don't think it can be Nvidia. Only because the SEC might not allow it essentially removing the only other discrete GPU maker.

 

[Blitzvogel]

Why are people defending this piece of crap?

Because people are trying to understand that which is Bulldozer, and why it is what it is.

*Cue Nancy Kerrigan* "WHY WHY WHY"

I think AMD's goal was to create a new paradigm in server market chip design. Typically their server processors directly trickle down to their high end PC business, and in this case it was no different. Had AMD not moved the chip into PCs, they would lose legitimacy with OEMs and builders alike by not providing new product to replace their older stuff. Unfortunately, BD does not show it's true colors within the basic PC realm of things. There are a number of reasons for this first round of BD performing below par, and the number of transistors it has is ridiculous for the performance we're seeing out of it. Perhaps, with a bit of proper tweaking, and a couple process steppings, it might turn out to be the winner it was hoped to be in the PC market. So people will whine and complain (which is understandable), some of us will just sit back and analyze, others will jump ship to Intel. The world still exists. My worry lies with AMD possibly dealing a huge blow to themselves here, though I think that is overly pessimistic. AMD is decently profitable in other areas, so they are covered alright for the time being. I really don't want to see the only other truly major x86 player getting kicked out of the business, though I would love to see Via actually step up and try to take down Intel in a key area of two.

 

[drizek]

Don't know if you're being cute or not, but no. I don't think it can be Nvidia. Only because the SEC might not allow it essentially removing the only other discrete GPU maker.

I'm still crossing my fingers for Larrabee

 

[Caza]

I'm ok with Oracle buying AMD. Larry Ellison and Mike Hurd are the right guys to do the job.

Oracle has their own CPU now after buying Sun. It's called the SPARC T3/T4. They have 16 and 8 cores respectively.

These chips were on hold for a while but now they're actually shipping.

 

[Caza]

Nice to see all the new members joining and old accounts being reactivated to defend the damsel in distress, but do we need a bunch of extra "it's really not as bad as all the benchmarks show" threads?

It's in our nature to rally for the underdog. AMD is 1/20th the size of Intel.

There's better ways to support AMD though. Buy their better price/performance products like Llano/Radeon.

 

[Riek]

When AMD is allowed to use the vexprefix you be sure and let me know about it .

Pokes. AMD is allowed to use the vexprefix. The only limitation they have is that they cannot add their own instructions in that prefix range. They are free to support any instruction Intel defines within the prefix range.

 

[amenx]

Zambezi is a river in Africa.

 

[zsdersw]

Rationalizations for Bulldozer can be made for the performance and possibly the price, but not the power consumption.

 

[F1shF4t]

Why are people defending this piece of crap?

I don't know why people are defending it, or why some people just have to shout from the rooftops that it sucks. Both camps are just as annoying.

Personally I wouldn't call it a piece of crap, since it is faster than all my comps. It just would not be my first choice for my main comp if I was building one now. (Maybe if I was still into gaming/ocing I would get one for my secondary comp, but that’s cause I like playing with new stuff )

 

[Keysplayr]

Sure, it's better than probably millions of computers.
AMD offers a great value. I'm talking PhenomII/AthlonII. My wifes 4800X2 rig died last month. Went to micro center and got a PhenomII X4 840, an ASUS mobo, 4GB DDR3, sata DVD drive for 160 bucks. How awesome is that? She didn't need anywhere near this power for what she does. The 4800X2 served her purposes. But I had to buy something and that price was pretty much unbeatable. My wife and son both have Phenom II rigs. My son has the PhenomII X3 720 BE. My daughter has a C2Q 6600 rig and I have what is in my sig. AMD has it's purposes and I used that well. Great low cost computing and reasonable performance.
What everyone is so miserable about is Bulldozer is slower, more expensive, hotter, and consumes more power than AMD's last gen. Not a good soup recipe.
Couple that with AMD's marketing campaign going across the web slandering all the review sites that produced benchmarks and were discounted as fake by AMD.
There is quite a lot to be pissed about. Even the most neutral person would be a bit miffed.

 

[WrongTarget]

I have a different style than 95% of the users in reading the reviews.

I'm far from being a HW guru but I know more or less what most of the benches mean in the real world.

For instance in that review I didn't even bother to read the performance in Excel 2010, that's for huge Excel spreadsheets. Not interested, couldn't care less.

Winrar compression - I use this every now and then. The FX-6100 being 25% slower that the more expensive 2500K is fine in my book.

Adobe Photoshop CS5 - Don't use the program but 26% slower than the 2500K is also fine.

Handbrake - I use that, 21% slower than the 2500K is nice. I have no problem with 50% slower, it's not like I can't do anything else on the PC while transcoding.

etc

The gaming performance in full HD is good, I would like to see the test with a less powerful video card (they used a Gigabyte GTX580 SOC).

But in the land "Intel wins in X benches while AMD wins only in Y, so Intel is much better" I guess the real performance once you start using it doesn't matter.

If you think that way, why do you even bother to follow new CPU-releases, since a s775 Q8XXX or an Athlon II x4 (or even a Core2Duo E5300 or Athlon II x2 250) would cover all of your needs?
When you compare CPU's you want to do it in a way that highlights the difference in CPU power. That's why most gaming tests are made in low resolutions, otherwise the GPU will limit the spread (GPU will choke in high resolutions and the faster CPU's will have to wait for data)

 

[classy]

Sure, it's better than probably millions of computers.
AMD offers a great value. I'm talking PhenomII/AthlonII. My wifes 4800X2 rig died last month. Went to micro center and got a PhenomII X4 840, an ASUS mobo, 4GB DDR3, sata DVD drive for 160 bucks. How awesome is that? She didn't need anywhere near this power for what she does. The 4800X2 served her purposes. But I had to buy something and that price was pretty much unbeatable. My wife and son both have Phenom II rigs. My son has the PhenomII X3 720 BE. My daughter has a C2Q 6600 rig and I have what is in my sig. AMD has it's purposes and I used that well. Great low cost computing and reasonable performance.
What everyone is so miserable about is Bulldozer is slower, more expensive, hotter, and consumes more power than AMD's last gen. Not a good soup recipe.
Couple that with AMD's marketing campaign going across the web slandering all the review sites that produced benchmarks and were discounted as fake by AMD.
There is quite a lot to be pissed about. Even the most neutral person would be a bit miffed.

Very well put. I think the biggest disappointment is that the issues with Bulldozer should have been known during the development of the processor. I am still trying to figure out how the issue with the OS scheduler goes unknown for that long? And the one thing no one has talk is the seriousness behind the power draw. Forget the performance drop, but this is the same cpu for servers sucking juice like that. And I would imagine the same issues with Win7 probably are in Server 2008 as well, so its not like they will be to jack up the processor speeds to compensate. This is a very poorly executed product, no way around that.

 

[techforums]

It feels like if I defend Bulldozer then I would have to defend the pentium 4.

 

[F1shF4t]

Sure, it's better than probably millions of computers.
AMD offers a great value. I'm talking PhenomII/AthlonII. My wifes 4800X2 rig died last month. Went to micro center and got a PhenomII X4 840, an ASUS mobo, 4GB DDR3, sata DVD drive for 160 bucks. How awesome is that? She didn't need anywhere near this power for what she does. The 4800X2 served her purposes. But I had to buy something and that price was pretty much unbeatable. My wife and son both have Phenom II rigs. My son has the PhenomII X3 720 BE. My daughter has a C2Q 6600 rig and I have what is in my sig. AMD has it's purposes and I used that well. Great low cost computing and reasonable performance.
What everyone is so miserable about is Bulldozer is slower, more expensive, hotter, and consumes more power than AMD's last gen. Not a good soup recipe.
Couple that with AMD's marketing campaign going across the web slandering all the review sites that produced benchmarks and were discounted as fake by AMD.
There is quite a lot to be pissed about. Even the most neutral person would be a bit miffed.

Fair enough. I guess I would be a bit more pissed off if I had an AM3+ board with plan to upgrade (especially if was silly enough to get a board in anticipation, would be fuming then) or associated with those review sites. It's a bit different when I have a dead end AM3 board with 12+ months old 1090T which suits me fine.

It feels like if I defend Bulldozer then I would have to defend the pentium 4.

I would take a P4C Northwood over an Athlon XP any day. People tend to forget that not all pentium 4s were slower than amd cpus at the time. Prescotts were terrible tho, which is what most tend to remember.

 

[techforums]

I would take a P4C Northwood over an Athlon XP any day. People tend to forget that not all pentium 4s were slower than amd cpus at the time. Prescotts were terrible tho, which is what most tend to remember.

Intel had something with the P4C and they took two steps back with prescott.

 

[Chiropteran]

If you think that way, why do you even bother to follow new CPU-releases, since a s775 Q8XXX or an Athlon II x4 (or even a Core2Duo E5300 or Athlon II x2 250) would cover all of your needs?
When you compare CPU's you want to do it in a way that highlights the difference in CPU power. That's why most gaming tests are made in low resolutions, otherwise the GPU will limit the spread (GPU will choke in high resolutions and the faster CPU's will have to wait for data)

That is the thing though. If you don't need a faster CPU for today's software, what do you need a faster CPU for? Stuff coming out in the future. And that is where bulldozer seems to shine. BF 3 beta, windows 8 beta- in those tests, bulldozer does very well on a price/performance measure.

I'd agree that even in these best case scenarios the power usage of bulldozer is too high, but some people don't care about that. Free electricity in apartments, or a cold environment where the extra heat isn't such a bad thing, or kids living in mom's basement.

 

[Nemesis 1]

Pokes. AMD is allowed to use the vexprefix. The only limitation they have is that they cannot add their own instructions in that prefix range. They are free to support any instruction Intel defines within the prefix range.

How is AMD going to use the Vexprefix without the compiler and other software in connection with the hardware . You need to read about the vexprefix AMDS uses XOP . If anyone says their the same they are lieing.

One tech site did testing with AVX The results for AMD were ugly.

 

[apoppin]

Couple that with AMD's marketing campaign going across the web slandering all the review sites that produced benchmarks and were discounted as fake by AMD.

i heard about this but i missed seeing it. My own CrossFire scaling results were awful with both Phenom II and FX-8150 which lead me to question the MB and the drivers. AMD has also contacted me about the awful scaling and i have set up a brand new installation of Win 7.

Same score in Vantage (i just setup a few minutes) and i am off to see if scaling is still bad in the games that were poor originally. If so, then i am going to test GTX 580 SLI and TriFire to see if the CPU is hitting a wall - or not. Last resort would be to try another MB; but that is up to AMD.

 

[Makaveli]

I'm a little confused? Is bulldozer a damsel in distress that needs defending? I thought it was just a processor.

That's what i'm saying why does a piece of silicon need you to defend its honor?

I give this thread a few pages until the fanboys tear it up and it gets closed.

 

[MiataNC]

What is there to defend?

1. Price = Currently the 8120/8150 are not priced low enough to entice informed buyers away from 2500K/2600K. Even when you take into account MB pricing, the "premium" for an Intel build still does not make BD appealing unless you already have an AM3+ board.

2. Performance = The 8120/8150 do not out perform or equal the performance of the 2500K/2600K for the types of apps/games most users run.

3. Power = The 8120/8150 draw more power by a wide margin when pushed to the limits required to "challenge" 2500K/2600K.

That is 3 HUGE strikes against BD.

1 can be addressed in the short term, but 2 and 3 will have to wait until revisions are made to the chip manufacturing process and/or the design is optimized to allow for higher clocks at lower power consumption.

 

[Dresdenboy]

How is AMD going to use the Vexprefix without the compiler and other software in connection with the hardware . You need to read about the vexprefix AMDS uses XOP . If anyone says their the same they are lieing.

One tech site did testing with AVX The results for AMD were ugly.

AMD recommends avoiding AVX when compiling with ICC. The 256b AVX ops (internally usually represented by 2 uops) just add overhead w/o adding throughput. GCC forces AVX128 to improve by ~3% on avg (SPECFP I assume).

 

[Kyanzes]

It could be percieved as trolling but I think if you have to bring something in its defense then there's something wrong.