Rumour: Bulldozer 50% Faster than Core i7 and Phenom II.

[SunnyD]

I'm sure it's been asked already...

If Core i7 core per core is already X% faster than Phenom II, then how in sam hell can Bulldozer be 50% faster than both Phenom II and Core i7, given Phenom II and Core i7 are already not on parity in terms of performance? You can have one or the other... not both.

 

[RussianSensation]

I'm sure it's been asked already...

If Core i7 core per core is already X% faster than Phenom II, then how in sam hell can Bulldozer be 50% faster than both Phenom II and Core i7, given Phenom II and Core i7 are already not on parity in terms of performance? You can have one or the other... not both.

I think you are taking 50% performance as an exact number. It's probably a very close estimate.

For example, Phenom II X6 1100T gets 5.90 in Cinebench while i7-950 gets 5.57. If BD gets 8.8 in Cinebench at stock speeds, it is ~ between 49% and 57% faster, respectively. You can just make a general statement that states BD can be around 50% faster than both in multi-threaded apps, which would be accurate in this instance.

 

[piesquared]

considering 4 current intel cores matches 6 amd cores who really made the poor design choice?

SB-E 6 - 8 core version will be coming out around the same time and this will be competition for BD not socket 1155.

christmas 2011 will be an great time to build a new system.

wrong. depends on the benchmark. i could pick benchmarks that show thuban matches or beats whatever intel calls it's 6 core thing.

and if by 'around the same time' you mean 5 months later, then sure i suppose you could spin it that way. think they can sell that at the same price as they sell they're 4 core + 4 imaginary core chip? i suppose they could compete by price, but then that would just mean they are doing what AMD are doing now, and that would make a lot of intel cheerleaders hypocrits.

 

[hamunaptra]

I think many of you are hoping this is a clock for clock comparison of IPC. For some reason, I believe the IPC has not really increased that much, well maybe it has 5-15%% per core over stars core but, like I stated in my previous post.
AMD is not going for IPC wars w/ current intel offerings. AMD is focusing on raw clockspeed to be competitive now. - kinda like the P4's goal.

Ive stated before. If AMD can maintain a 3.5ghz - 4.5ghz clockspeed on BD right out of the gate they will have one heck of a winner on their hands.
The biggest question is the processors clockspeed at this point. We can estimate its IPC output all day long and compare it to processors today at similar clocks.

But without final clockspeed numbers, we will have no idea how much faster it is. If AMD can prove the race for high clocks is on...and do it well, they will pass intel by for the time being...NO problem.
Intel had its chance w/ the P4 and it was messed up all to hell. Now AMD thinks it can pull off a clockspeed war...and I wish them the best!

I dont know if many of you have read:
http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT082610181333&p=1

But its one of the best articles on BD arch yet. It clearly states there are a lot more stages in BD's pipelines, the L2 caches are higher latency, yet huge...there are other various things that all point to a high clock speed driven architecture.
Kinda like the Power7, if IBM can pull it off .. I am also confident AMD can too!

Heres to hoping for a 5.5ghz BD OC on air cooling!!!!

 

[Vic Vega]

Ya AMD said the same about Phenom I didn't they . Slides are still in those old topics.

I don't recall them saying that.

 

[StinkyPinky]

Good luck to them. Despite having a 2500K I hope AMD creates a monster of a CPU. Look what happened when the Athlon killed the P4. Intel responded with the brilliant Core 2. Competition is great.

 

[SlitheryDee]

Good luck to them. Despite having a 2500K I hope AMD creates a monster of a CPU. Look what happened when the Athlon killed the P4. Intel responded with the brilliant Core 2. Competition is great.

My thoughts exactly. I'm a bit of an AMD fanboy seeing as my first DIY computer in junior high was an AMD back in the K6-2 days, but I'm not so much of a fanboy that I could turn a blind eye to sandy bridge. Here's hoping that AMD is able to come up with something worth my $$ next go 'round.

 

[OBLAMA2009]

even if it is that fast, which i doubt, theyre going to have to come up with some new applications to justify why a typical user should go out and buy computers this fast.

 

[Dresdenboy]

I dont know if many of you have read:
http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT082610181333&p=1

But its one of the best articles on BD arch yet. It clearly states there are a lot more stages in BD's pipelines, the L2 caches are higher latency, yet huge...there are other various things that all point to a high clock speed driven architecture.
Kinda like the Power7, if IBM can pull it off .. I am also confident AMD can too!

Heres to hoping for a 5.5ghz BD OC on air cooling!!!!

We might find sth. like twenty stages to be one significant number. But the arch could have some feature similar to e.g. Cell: differently clocked domains in a module, different effective pipeline lengths during branch mispredictions and so on. I still wouldn't count out some faster clocked integer units (a bit like the Flywheel architecture). So which clock are we talking about? General or EU clock?

 

[HW2050Plus]

Pure speculation. Please provide evidence and/or links to support these facts...HIGHLY doubtful of a 70-100% gain. Not going to happen.

Just kidding? How much faster is any quad core compared to equivalent dual core? Now guess.

 

[Makaveli]

wrong. depends on the benchmark. i could pick benchmarks that show thuban matches or beats whatever intel calls it's 6 core thing.

and if by 'around the same time' you mean 5 months later, then sure i suppose you could spin it that way. think they can sell that at the same price as they sell they're 4 core + 4 imaginary core chip? i suppose they could compete by price, but then that would just mean they are doing what AMD are doing now, and that would make a lot of intel cheerleaders hypocrits.

Wait what?

You can show me benchmarks of AMD 6 core cpu's matching or beating the x980 or 970?

Please share I would like to see these. Because what what i've read when they are matched up 6core vs 6cores its not even close.

The only benchmarks i've seen the 6 core amd chip match or beat the 4 cores chips are encoding example handbrake. There for only applications that can use all 6 cores which is not alot of software currently.

You do know that big blue is like 10x the size of AMD, we will never see them in the same position amd is in now.

Even when the athlon 64 chips were beating the crap out of P4 intel was still making more money!

My operton 170 now in the closet was one of my favourite chips but lets get back to reality shall we.

 

[HW2050Plus]

considering 4 current intel cores matches 6 amd cores who really made the poor design choice?

SB-E 6 - 8 core version will be coming out around the same time and this will be competition for BD not socket 1155.

christmas 2011 will be an great time to build a new system.

That is right. SB-E 6-8 core will compete with BD 12-16 core at that time.

For understanding right:
1 Intel core is equivalent to 1 bulldozer module (die size, etc.)
1 Intel thread (HT) is equivalent to 1 bulldozer core

They did not name it core and thread as Intel because of the design difference. A 8 core / 4 module Bulldozer and a 8 thread / 4 core Sandybridge show both 8 cores to operating system / task manager. The difference is that half of the shown number is just virtual with Intel but real with AMD. To point out that they are real they made this core/module renaming.

You could also just rename module with core then you get: "4 current Intel cores match 3 AMD Bulldozer cores".

Don't get confused with the naming differences.

 

[Makaveli]

i'm not getting confused i've read many posts about how we are suppose to look at the core count on BD which won't be directly comparable to SB. And i'm really interested in how all the reviews are going to break it down.

And I think price and performance will determine where the chips are stacked not core count. We all know the mass market they don't know the difference between RAM and ROM.

 

[Phynaz]

Well if intel's threads can't compete with cores, i guess they made a poor design choice now didn't they.

I'm confused too...

Anandtech is a f*****g pu**y and a shill, and what's worse, is a chicken sh*t for trying to deny it.

...I won't click on an AT link, ever.

 

[Markfw]

Just kidding? How much faster is any quad core compared to equivalent dual core? Now guess.

It depends on the software, that is FACT. If the software if well multi-threaded, you can get 100% (or close to it). If not, zero...

 

[flexcore]

And I think price and performance will determine where the chips are stacked not core count. We all know the mass market they don't know the difference between RAM and ROM.

This is what is going to matter. Bottom line is price. In the and $200 Intel vs. $200 AMD.
I don't really care how they get me the performance. Don't get me wrong, I love reading about how each company gets to XX amount, but thats academic. When I go to buy my MB + CPU I base it on what I get for the amount I have to spend. Sure if one has 25% more performance in apps that I use I will stretch the budget but it's not so I get more cores that really matters.

 

[Makaveli]

This is what is going to matter. Bottom line is price. In the and $200 Intel vs. $200 AMD.
I don't really care how they get me the performance. Don't get me wrong, I love reading about how each company gets to XX amount, but thats academic. When I go to buy my MB + CPU I base it on what I get for the amount I have to spend. Sure if one has 25% more performance in apps that I use I will stretch the budget but it's not so I get more cores that really matters.

I agree, it reminds me of phenom 1 when AMD was pushing it was a true Quad as opposed to the Core2Quad. And at the end of the day it made no difference performance per dollar is what most people care about.

 

[Hulk]

While this discussion is interesting I believe that the number of cores isn't going to be the deciding factor for who is on top. AMD or Intel can jam more as many uncompetitive cores into a cpu as they want and it still won't be the chip to buy. Notice Phenom x6, people aren't running to that like they are SB.

But rather it will be IPC and clockspeed that will continue to rule the day as you can't make up for the with more and more cores since your competition will do the same with better cores. And in that area it seems Intel continues to pull away from AMD. We'd all like to think that AMD will catch up to all of these incremental Intel increases in IPC since C2D in one big move. But in reality that most likely will not happen. Intel would have to make a wrong turn for quite a few years, like they did with the Pentium 4 to allow AMD to catch up and surpass them. I don't think Intel will be fooled again.

 

[Makaveli]

Good post even if BD is much faster than SB it won't change intels position. AMD just doesn't have the side or revenue to remove them from the top.

Alot of the hardcore fans are forgetting that, this isn't Ati vs NV!

However well all need them to release something competitive!

 

[hamunaptra]

Just a thought I had that noone has really brought up yet.
Is there any chance that intels new SB prices are so good on the processors, is because intel knows of BD's performance and realizes they cant compete at the prices they used to ask for?

tehehe =)

 

[busydude]

Is there any chance that intels new SB prices are so good on the processors, is because intel knows of BD's performance and realizes they cant compete at the prices they used to ask for?

Even better, socket 2011 based processors.. may wipe the floor with 1155 counterparts.

 

[Makaveli]

Just a thought I had that noone has really brought up yet.
Is there any chance that intels new SB prices are so good on the processors, is because intel knows of BD's performance and realizes they cant compete at the prices they used to ask for?

tehehe =)

This may be true you never know.

Intel still has to release socket 2011 so I believe we haven't seen anything yet.

 

[Idontcare]

Just a thought I had that noone has really brought up yet.
Is there any chance that intels new SB prices are so good on the processors, is because intel knows of BD's performance and realizes they cant compete at the prices they used to ask for?

tehehe =)

Even if it were true why would that prevent Intel from charging higher prices now until BD releases and gives it some competition?

 

[RavenSEAL]

I like the confidence by AMD, give me a nice price and SB can go to hell

 

[PreferLinux]

Well if intel's threads can't compete with cores, i guess they made a poor design choice now didn't they.

No, they doubled the threads they can run with pretty much the same hardware, which improves efficiency (of hardware resources and therefore manufacturing costs). So haw is that poor design?

I think many of you are hoping this is a clock for clock comparison of IPC. For some reason, I believe the IPC has not really increased that much, well maybe it has 5-15%% per core over stars core but, like I stated in my previous post.
AMD is not going for IPC wars w/ current intel offerings. AMD is focusing on raw clockspeed to be competitive now. - kinda like the P4's goal.

Ive stated before. If AMD can maintain a 3.5ghz - 4.5ghz clockspeed on BD right out of the gate they will have one heck of a winner on their hands.
The biggest question is the processors clockspeed at this point. We can estimate its IPC output all day long and compare it to processors today at similar clocks.

But without final clockspeed numbers, we will have no idea how much faster it is. If AMD can prove the race for high clocks is on...and do it well, they will pass intel by for the time being...NO problem.
Intel had its chance w/ the P4 and it was messed up all to hell. Now AMD thinks it can pull off a clockspeed war...and I wish them the best!

I dont know if many of you have read:
http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cf...2610181333&p=1

But its one of the best articles on BD arch yet. It clearly states there are a lot more stages in BD's pipelines, the L2 caches are higher latency, yet huge...there are other various things that all point to a high clock speed driven architecture.
Kinda like the Power7, if IBM can pull it off .. I am also confident AMD can too!

Heres to hoping for a 5.5ghz BD OC on air cooling!!!!

Increasing the pipeline depth will decrease IPC while allowing for itcreases in clock speed. For IPC to increase at the same time as the pipeline there would have to be major architectural improvements. So from that, AMD is trying to do a repeat of Pentium 4/Netburst!!!???