AMD Announces 8-Core Bulldozer CPU!
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Amusing the name "Buldozer" when they also refer to Intel as being "Brute force", "ironic" I guess...
I also don't see how having the cores share more resources rather than be more isolated is supposed to give radically better performance. Seems like more bottlenecks. But I may be reading the dumbed down PR release wrong.
BUT of course the proof will be in the pudding. AMD has been out of it for so long you start to wonder if they are still around (kind of like Mac desktops). So yeah good that they are still kicking. Keeping Intel under the gun will only produce more advances in the future... The last couple of big AMD releases were underwelming at launch, lets hope they get it right this time. :)
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And how many popular commercial apps are written to utilize multi-core, much less this type of design? Not many.
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Yeah I enjoy having my 4x2 cores and all with running 2-3 high CPU usage apps at once, but there is a limit toh ow much I can personally fill all cores.
I've been a bit dissapointed in the "it's all about cores" mentality of both AMD and Intel in the last few years with ZERO increase in clock speed. A 100 core processor at 3.4 gig is the same exact speed as a 1 core with 99% of all apps. :/
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Yeah I enjoy having my 4x2 cores and all with running 2-3 high CPU usage apps at once, but there is a limit toh ow much I can personally fill all cores.
I've been a bit dissapointed in the "it's all about cores" mentality of both AMD and Intel in the last few years with ZERO increase in clock speed. A 100 core processor at 3.4 gig is the same exact speed as a 1 core with 99% of all apps. :/
I'm not worried about the lack of increase in clock speed. It's not as important as it used to be when clock speeds were so much slower. It is the fastest component thus the others play catchup. However, the distribution in work (i.e. more efficiently spreading the computations over 2, 4, or 8 cores) is now important.
If you have 3/4 cores handling 6 apps and the last core not doing much, you are not being as efficient as possible.
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Yeah I enjoy having my 4x2 cores and all with running 2-3 high CPU usage apps at once, but there is a limit toh ow much I can personally fill all cores.
I've been a bit dissapointed in the "it's all about cores" mentality of both AMD and Intel in the last few years with ZERO increase in clock speed. A 100 core processor at 3.4 gig is the same exact speed as a 1 core with 99% of all apps. :/
Well.. Since the NetBurst days, the focus has shifted to IPC (Instructions Per Clock) rather than raw clock speed because there are physical limits to how fast/hot you can reliably make a piece of silicon. Especially since, as you shrink the process, issues centered around current leakage become more and more severe and directly conflict with the ability to increase voltage as a (partial) means to force more clock speed. Basically: It's difficult enough when you have 130nm traces... Now we're down to 32nm having to do the same job.
And so we get to this notion that 'Wider Is Better', and we have pipelines optimised to do more work in the same time period.
And quite honestly, merely looking at the clock speed number is very much over simplistic. Let's compare a Q6700 to an i7 920: At 2.6GHz, they're both the same clock speed. But (using the weighted average published at Tom's Hardware) the I7 920 is a whopping 76% better. And it's because the i7 architecture is that much more efficient than the old Q. It does more work at the same "speed".
Tom's Hardware - Benchmark 3DMark Vantage 1.0.2 CPU
Charts, benchmarks 2009 Desktop CPU Charts (Update 1), Performance Index
AMD have made similar advances from their old Phenom to the new PHII and Thuban offerings - Though admittedly not quite to the same extent.
Now - I do get what you mean about single threaded operations. But it's still not as simple as 3.2 GHz being 'better' than 2.2. CPUs are not architected like that any more. (..if they ever were at all - IMHO, the GHZ race was just as much driven by marketing as it was a real technological need. Marketing being the tail that wagged the Netburst Dog...)
Bringing this back to AMD: Bulldozer is hugely important to AMD. But as the article states, it's aimed at the Server space rather than the Desktop. This segment is hugely profitable, and AMD lost what used to be their primary technological advantage: An Integrated Memory Controller. Basically - from a system design perspective, Intel stepped up and leveled the field. Except Intel have more (sales) muscle. So AMD's sales efforts in the Enterprise space have suffered (anecdotally, anyhow - nobody publishes the exact figures).
Bulldozer is aimed at regaining AMD's position in the server space. And if you're looking for the next "Can It Play Crysis" CPU, then I'm of the opinion you're very likely to be disappointed.
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Bringing this back to AMD: Bulldozer is hugely important to AMD. But as the article states, it's aimed at the Server space rather than the Desktop. This segment is hugely profitable, and AMD lost what used to be their primary technological advantage: An Integrated Memory Controller. Basically - from a system design perspective, Intel stepped up and leveled the field. Except Intel have more (sales) muscle. So AMD's sales efforts in the Enterprise space have suffered (anecdotally, anyhow - nobody publishes the exact figures).
Yeah, I believe that Intel is on about 95% of the boxes. In the businesses that I have worked at....we've never owned a single AMD based server. A handful of desktops yes....but no servers.
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I have read articles about Bulldoser for quite a while and they all said it would use the AM3 socket. Well they were wrong. Another new socket so no easy upgrade. I'll wait another couple years for my next upgrade. By then something better will be out.
Jim 
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Well, AMD seems to aim for servers by now, but that does not mean that we will not see a new desktop optimized version... I knew AMD was about to release something like that...
Intel is a great chip manufacturer, no one doubts that, but the core i7 is just better because they integrated HT in the cores... that is just a new quad core chip with more "threads" and new architecture... I've worked with old prescott HT models, and HT does nothing, is better to disable that thing, at least for apps like photoshop, that really need real cores. Anyway this will be a great push for Intel so they aim for real cores instead of trying to sell fakes (at least it was for me... I was specting them being the firts ones of releasing an 8 core chip).
In my oppinion, I've used AMD for about 4 years, and I'm really happy, my actual processor is quite fast, I can create DVD's with almost no effort and do many tasks with no slowdown... I guess that this will be my next target in some time, a new rig with a 8 core chip and 16 GB RAM... and a good ATI chip 
but I need to save money first 
See ya!!
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Might be a good CPU for my Lan pc sicne my old Q6600/G41 is getting old
OLD
Q6600 Stock
2GB DDR2 1066
Geforce GTX285
Asus G41 Mobo
Xfi Exreme Gamer
and new ill have
the New amd cpu
8GB DDR3 1600+
Ati Radeon 5xxx Xfire
Xfi Extreme Gamer
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I have 6GB RAM but need to double that at least, as I run multiple virtual machines at once.
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