In defense of "Bulldozer"

[deadrats]

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.

[jagabo]

In the end, all that matters is how it performs next to the competition. If it could compete with an i7 990X AMD could charge comparable prices.

[aedipuss]

i don't care if you call it 8 core or 4 core with ht it still has the same 8 threads as an intel i/ quad series. didn't the damn thing get smoked by sandybridge i7 and barely rival the i5 and use 33% more watts doing it? and those are old intel cpu designs, they have held off on their newer stuff. intel's new 22nm 3d transistors are coming with about a 37% performance bump and and 50% decrease in power required over 32nm...........

[deadrats]

i don't care if you call it 8 core or 4 core with ht it still has the same 8 threads as an intel i/ quad series. didn't the damn thing get smoked by sandybridge i7 and barely rival the i5 and use 33% more watts doing it? and those are old intel cpu designs, they have held off on their newer stuff. intel's new 22nm 3d transistors are coming with about a 37% performance bump and and 50% decrease in power required over 32nm...........

in heavily threaded apps the 8150 actually manages to edge out the i7 2600k, this architecture was conceived so that AMD could go after the HPC and server market, markets that are very lucrative thanks to the much higher profit margins and higher numbers sold (a super computer can have 100,000 processors).

in any heavily threaded benchmark, such as some photoshop benchmarks, the new FX's are untouchable.

i still think that the review methodologies of the various sites are short sighted and a bit unfair to Bulldozer; i'm willing to bet money that if you were to do a test encode with HD sources and targets, high bit rates, a few filters and effects and manually set the thread count to at least the core count that the FX would beat SB.

i'm also willing to bet that in games that have a heavy multiplayer component, that Bulldozer will shine.

yes, Ivy Bridge will bury this version of BD but IB has been pushed back to around April of 2012 and it's strongly rumored that by Feb AMD will release a 5 module 10 core BD variant, it's conceivable that such processor, or even a 6 module 12 core beast, would be more than enough to hold off IB and keep AMD competitive, at least from a performance perspective (granted in power consumption Intel can't be touched).

[aedipuss]

the power consumption of the bulldozer may keep it from htpc and supercomputer use, unless they are in iceland and need to heat an outdoor olympic swimming pool. any further cores added will put the beast at unheard of wattage levels. overclockering enthusiasts will need liquid nitrogen tank refills daily. the latest supercomputers are moving to nvidia gpu use from what i've seen announced and built.

the sandybridge 4 core ht cpus will already use 100% of all 8 threads on multithreaded encodes(without melting down ). mine runs 8 threads at 4.0ghz, 60C all day long if needed.