AMD Announces 8-Core Bulldozer CPU!

Count me In AMD really rocks i hope it wont reach $1k though

shinsekidoll said:

Count me In AMD really rocks i hope it wont reach $1k though

AMD's ok...nothing spectacular in the past 5 years though. Intel has whooped them through and through and Intel is no longer significantly more expensive.

Rhammstein said:

"According to AMD, Bulldozer will be built on a new 32nm process at Global Foundries."

That's the best news ever!, I guess that we will get no overheating probs anymore at least with this technology (since 65nm, AMD has controlled that problem... at least on most high end chips).

See ya!!

FerchogtX said:

Rhammstein said:

"According to AMD, Bulldozer will be built on a new 32nm process at Global Foundries."

That's the best news ever!, I guess that we will get no overheating probs anymore at least with this technology (since 65nm, AMD has controlled that problem... at least on most high end chips).

See ya!!

Hahah Overheating... so true... Well, in "high-perf. desktop" cooling isn't always an issue, I guess the heat troubles from OC/super-gaming just get annoying. On my OC'd desktop, my, "high-performance" desktop, my cooling... is a problem.
.

Rhammstein said:

I've read a number of articles, and what AMD themselves have said, and there are versions for the server space, and for high end performance desktop.

Saying it won't be aimed at the desktop is incredibly wrong, they're "aiming" directly at it.

"
“The single-core performance on some floating-point applications is going to be mind-boggling,” Brookewood says.
AMD officials say Bulldozer is being targeted at servers and performance desktop machines. The good news is that Bulldozer will be drop-in compatible with most current high-end servers. The bad news is that it won’t be compatible with existing AM3 boards. Instead, AMD says it will introduce a new AM3+ socket. These sockets will be backward compatible with older chips so you could drop a Phenom II X6 in it. According to AMD, Bulldozer will be built on a new 32nm process at Global Foundries. "


I hope it will be on par with 975X/980X, for half the price, which it probably will be. (perhaps not quite.. as powerful, but possibly)

The way they'll have 2 cores working together.. It just seems like it would be incredibly powerful in many scenario's.

I recommend reading up on the chip a bit more, for those who seem entirely mistaken about Bulldozer.

Presumably, the above was aimed at me.

The way they'll have 2 cores working together.. It just seems like it would be incredibly powerful in many scenario's.

This is backwards, and therefore incorrect.

AMD did not figure out a way to magically execute a thread on more than one core. What AMD did is to add a second set of integer execution hardware to their existing design.

On the way "In", procesors use a what's called 'Register Units' to track/control threads headed to the processor to be executed. There needs to be one of these per active thread. These are fed by (typically) a single Integer unit per core. In concert, the two units work to keep the actual processing core fed and always busy. What AMD did is add a second integer unit to the existing pair of register units, which should give Bulldozer a finer level of control over which threads are executed where, and when. Therefore a Bulldozer based system would be able to keep the actual processor more busy, more of the time.

Once you understand the above, it should be clear that AMD do not have two cores working together. They added more/better/finer control over threads waiting to be executed so the actual 'processor' can be utilized mroe efficiently and effectively.

Also - if you actually read AMD's slides, they talk about reducing power consumption and Performance Per Watt. These are important on the Server side: A datacenter may have 10's or even hundreds of processors at once, and therefore power efficiency is the subject of great interest. On the desktop it's mentioned in passing, and generally then only in the context of heat dissipation rather than actual power usage.


And you'll also pardon me if I'm less than impressed by quotations from AMD marketing releases which are misinterpreted into whatever it is an individual poster happens to believe matters.

I would refer you to: Evolution, not revolution: a look at AMD's Bulldozer for a VERY nice article describing what I am speaking about.

Can Bulldozer save AMD?

Nothing about Bulldozer looks like a huge gamble. When considered in the context of other very wide SMT designs from IBM and Intel, Bulldozer is actually a conservative, evolutionary step forward from what has gone before.

In the world of processor design, evolution is always a lot better than revolution. It's the radical designs that fail to live up to expectations (e.g., Itanium, Pentium 4, IBM Cell), while more conservative, incremental approaches tend to win out in the end.

That said, as incremental improvements go, adding a whole separate set of four integer units is a pretty large increment. This introduces many changes, and there are a ton of knobs that will need to be dialed in to exactly the right value (cache size, cache associativity, cache latency, instruction buffer size, partition policy, decode bandwidth, etc.). Of course, this is always the case with a brand new design, but that's what's perilous for AMD—these values often get tweaked as the design matures, but Bulldozer won't be mature for some time. AMD needs Bulldozer to deliver immediately, though, so the margin for error is zero.

But even if the first Bulldozer products ship on-time and are fully price/performance and performance/watt competitive with Intel, Bulldozer (and Bobcat, which I'll talk more about in a separate piece) may still not be the home run that AMD needs.

Fighting the last war

AMD always succeeds when it attacks Intel not where the latter is strong, but where it is weak. Historically, AMD's biggest wins have come when the company moved into an obvious hole in Intel's product line. For example, when Intel announced that EPIC and Itanium would be its 64-bit upgrade path, AMD countered with x86-64 and scored a huge victory in the server market. Or, when delays with the QuickPath Interconnect forced Intel to stick with its aging frontside bus architecture for way too long, AMD exploited its superior HyperTransport interconnect to pursue the multisocket server market. When Intel was pushing RAMBUS and, later, the power-hungry FB-DIMM, AMD stuck with cheaper DDR and gained a platform-level performance/watt advantage.

Right now, there are no obvious weak spots in Intel's conventional server platform; indeed, Intel's Xeon line is as strong as it has ever been. (Mobile is a different story, but that's a topic for later.) Insofar as Bulldozer is aimed at the server market, AMD is attacking Intel when and where the larger chipmaker is at its absolute strongest.

..I'd also remind that Floating Point performance is only one aspect or processor performance, that there is a LOT of tuning and detail work involved, that apps well optimized for Multithreaded operations are a rarity on the desktop, and (above all) that taking a vendor's press releases at face value is foolhardy at best.

I very much prefer 3rd party sources. The reason why is I was a Sales and Marketing guy for a long time, and can tell you from personal experience that the whatever paper they hand you is best recycled into a suitable grade of toilet paper.