I haven't been on AT in a long, long time but I am really annoyed right now and looking for some simple answers to this one question. How does the new AMD Bulldozer CPU lineup compare to Intel's stuff? I have been googling and browsing AT and Tom's looking for answers and Tom's desktop CPU charts haven't been updated since 2010. I am really starting to smell conspiracy here wondering if either AMD has bought off some publications, or if they nurture a fanboyish hope of AMD's product succeeding where it isn't. Youtube is filled with videos of complete idiots who know nothing about CPU architecture or performance, the highest rated videos are crap, or in German. I don't speak German being a unilingual American, but I am tempted to learn it now if the IQ of my country has dropped 20 or so points in the past couple years where I haven't paid attention to computers.
Ok, I am apparently in rant mode, sorry about that. I think it's going to get worse in a minute.
The core of my question is simply, how does each CPU stack up in synthetic benchmarks? How do they fare in integer versus floating point calculations . I would like to see a chart of single core performance so I can scale it up myself to multi-cores, or better yet a review that does this. Give me a solid benchmark so I can figure out price/performance myself, since prices change all the time. As a bonus, I would like to know the pipeline length of each CPU.
Years ago, I checked Tom's every day for decent articles and had their widget on my iGoogle page. I had to take it down as the writing became crap and I stopped going there. I don't even like going there now looking for answers but I am desperate. Anandtech, on the other hand, usually makes me feel like I am in college again in my computer architecture class. I am a software engineer, but I studied and understand CPU design in general terms. I have been looking on AT, and not seeing much in the way of comparisons here.
I caught an article when Bulldozer first came out, and the general idea was that this product newer than Intel's design doesn't stack up clock for clock. The low price point may make it worth it. But I am having a hard time figuring out which CPU is a sweet spot for price/performance. A few years ago I upgraded my dual socket opteton system to an i3 Clarkdale and was satisfied, also saving about 15 bucks a month on my power bill (mainly because server boards love to eat juice). I was down to two cores and hyper threading at 3ghz and doing all things fine.
Ok, I guess I don't have a lot of points here. I am really looking for an objective view from someone who knows what they are talking about and not a fanboy. Sorry I haven't searched a lot yet here, I am just fed up with the rest of the internet.
I think I am still in ass kicking mode so get ready for a rant punishing fanboys. I have just seen too much of this and need to vent.
Worshiping a brand is stupid. It's idiotic. Any company can make crap regardless of their brand. Pure and simple. Saying (AMD/Intel) is the best and always has been equals saying nothing.
I give credit where it is due. I give credit to AMD for not going out of business in a recession after buying ATI and having no money left; I give them credit for having a nice, low price point. I give credit to Intel for eventually getting it's head out of it's ass and making a good performance/clock CPU starting with Core 2, which was based off of the Israeli designed Pentium-M.
A brief history lesson, from about the year 2000, Intel made a series of bad decisions as the CPU market leader. In the early days of P4, the CPU was slower than the P3, and they were locked into a contract with Rambus to only use expensive RDRAM on their platform. Meanwhile, AMD benefited from the new, cheaper, and easier to produce DDR memory. Intel had to catch up later to switch to DDR. AMD's CPUs were better clock for clock, so they were the first to start labeling the CPU with something other than clock speed, and came out with the performance number. Eventually, Intel went this route. After the Itanium failure, Intel was reluctant to do what had always been done in x86 CPUs - widen the registers again, this time to 64 bit. AMD led the way, launching some nicer server chips called Opteron so we could get more than 4GB of ram. Intel had to copy this. Intel kept pushing for more ghz with prescott having a 32 stage pipeline over northwood's 20 stage, reaching 3.8ghz at a million watts and less clock-for-clock performance. AMD first decided to integrate the memory controller on the CPU die to improve overall system performance, and eventually Intel caught up. Intel pushed themselves to the wall like idiots, paying the price to AMD along the way. I'm not sure who was first in the dual core thing, but you get the idea.
But those days are over. The romance is long since done. Has been for several years now. Intel still has a virtual monopoly on the desktop CPU market, and with that much money they managed to not suck after years of bad decisions. The Core 2 was better clock-for-clock and low power consuming becoming an overclocker's wet dream. They are always ahead of the curve in manufacturing process so it always seems that at any given time, they have the best OC chip. Glad that Bulldozer is at least 32nm.
In the AMD glory days, there were nothing but Intel fanboys trashing AMD chips for catching on fire. But AMD had the better product and it costed less, period. Intel stood by saying it had more ghz. Now the shoe seems to be on the other foot. AMD has something with more ghz (breaking all sorts of OC speed records measured in ghz!) while intel's product is better clock for clock. All I have been hearing is a lot of loud AMD fanboys and a lot of hype about bulldozer and it seems that it did not deliver. I can't tell by finding any benchmarks over the yelling of "more cores!"
AMD has more cores. I am not so dumb as to believe an 8-core CPU is twice as fast as a 4 core CPU. I understand real world applications barely use four on a good day. The geek idiot in me does drool over having 12 or 16 cores, but then I catch myself and realize that the number of cores doesn't matter as much as performance per core, especially when we are talking drastically different architectures. I have heard claims that 6 intel cores beats out a 12 core amd chip on some things. The benchmarks are hard to find. If this is true, it is huge news that could be shrouded by the noise of marketing.
Cliffs:
So this is a very long rant by a man enraged by his own inability to find benchmarks and make any sense out of the CPU world. Maybe I just suck.
Ok, I am apparently in rant mode, sorry about that. I think it's going to get worse in a minute.
The core of my question is simply, how does each CPU stack up in synthetic benchmarks? How do they fare in integer versus floating point calculations . I would like to see a chart of single core performance so I can scale it up myself to multi-cores, or better yet a review that does this. Give me a solid benchmark so I can figure out price/performance myself, since prices change all the time. As a bonus, I would like to know the pipeline length of each CPU.
Years ago, I checked Tom's every day for decent articles and had their widget on my iGoogle page. I had to take it down as the writing became crap and I stopped going there. I don't even like going there now looking for answers but I am desperate. Anandtech, on the other hand, usually makes me feel like I am in college again in my computer architecture class. I am a software engineer, but I studied and understand CPU design in general terms. I have been looking on AT, and not seeing much in the way of comparisons here.
I caught an article when Bulldozer first came out, and the general idea was that this product newer than Intel's design doesn't stack up clock for clock. The low price point may make it worth it. But I am having a hard time figuring out which CPU is a sweet spot for price/performance. A few years ago I upgraded my dual socket opteton system to an i3 Clarkdale and was satisfied, also saving about 15 bucks a month on my power bill (mainly because server boards love to eat juice). I was down to two cores and hyper threading at 3ghz and doing all things fine.
Ok, I guess I don't have a lot of points here. I am really looking for an objective view from someone who knows what they are talking about and not a fanboy. Sorry I haven't searched a lot yet here, I am just fed up with the rest of the internet.
I think I am still in ass kicking mode so get ready for a rant punishing fanboys. I have just seen too much of this and need to vent.
Worshiping a brand is stupid. It's idiotic. Any company can make crap regardless of their brand. Pure and simple. Saying (AMD/Intel) is the best and always has been equals saying nothing.
I give credit where it is due. I give credit to AMD for not going out of business in a recession after buying ATI and having no money left; I give them credit for having a nice, low price point. I give credit to Intel for eventually getting it's head out of it's ass and making a good performance/clock CPU starting with Core 2, which was based off of the Israeli designed Pentium-M.
A brief history lesson, from about the year 2000, Intel made a series of bad decisions as the CPU market leader. In the early days of P4, the CPU was slower than the P3, and they were locked into a contract with Rambus to only use expensive RDRAM on their platform. Meanwhile, AMD benefited from the new, cheaper, and easier to produce DDR memory. Intel had to catch up later to switch to DDR. AMD's CPUs were better clock for clock, so they were the first to start labeling the CPU with something other than clock speed, and came out with the performance number. Eventually, Intel went this route. After the Itanium failure, Intel was reluctant to do what had always been done in x86 CPUs - widen the registers again, this time to 64 bit. AMD led the way, launching some nicer server chips called Opteron so we could get more than 4GB of ram. Intel had to copy this. Intel kept pushing for more ghz with prescott having a 32 stage pipeline over northwood's 20 stage, reaching 3.8ghz at a million watts and less clock-for-clock performance. AMD first decided to integrate the memory controller on the CPU die to improve overall system performance, and eventually Intel caught up. Intel pushed themselves to the wall like idiots, paying the price to AMD along the way. I'm not sure who was first in the dual core thing, but you get the idea.
But those days are over. The romance is long since done. Has been for several years now. Intel still has a virtual monopoly on the desktop CPU market, and with that much money they managed to not suck after years of bad decisions. The Core 2 was better clock-for-clock and low power consuming becoming an overclocker's wet dream. They are always ahead of the curve in manufacturing process so it always seems that at any given time, they have the best OC chip. Glad that Bulldozer is at least 32nm.
In the AMD glory days, there were nothing but Intel fanboys trashing AMD chips for catching on fire. But AMD had the better product and it costed less, period. Intel stood by saying it had more ghz. Now the shoe seems to be on the other foot. AMD has something with more ghz (breaking all sorts of OC speed records measured in ghz!) while intel's product is better clock for clock. All I have been hearing is a lot of loud AMD fanboys and a lot of hype about bulldozer and it seems that it did not deliver. I can't tell by finding any benchmarks over the yelling of "more cores!"
AMD has more cores. I am not so dumb as to believe an 8-core CPU is twice as fast as a 4 core CPU. I understand real world applications barely use four on a good day. The geek idiot in me does drool over having 12 or 16 cores, but then I catch myself and realize that the number of cores doesn't matter as much as performance per core, especially when we are talking drastically different architectures. I have heard claims that 6 intel cores beats out a 12 core amd chip on some things. The benchmarks are hard to find. If this is true, it is huge news that could be shrouded by the noise of marketing.
Cliffs:
So this is a very long rant by a man enraged by his own inability to find benchmarks and make any sense out of the CPU world. Maybe I just suck.
Last edited: