Honestly I'm far from some of the nerds that actually understand this stuff. But I will say this. The only thing with bulldozer's new arch is that it has better scaling than hyperthreading on threads 5-8, I also remember reading that the bulldozer 32 NM core is 20% bigger than the Sandy Bridge 32 nm core meaing the extra 4 integer cores add 20% to the comparison of a sandy bridge. Now, if bulldozer scaled 20% better on threads 5-8 and matched the IPC in single threaded tasks we'd have something, they'll get to a point where their single threading is within 30% and their multithreading with all 8 threads used is within 5% or even 5% over or they'll flop, cease to exist, and sell out to Texas Instruments in a bankruptcy sale, who knows. Looks like piledriver will be within 10% of the 2600k in Battlefield 3 and cost us $40.00 less with the amd mobos also being what, $30 cheaper in total than a socket 1155 board? Not sure how this will play out, but steamroller, if they also improve 20%, and haswell improves 16%, then we might start to see what im talking about. I'm talking about 8 threads vs 8 threads, all other workloads will likely fail against intel and be up to 30% slower (single, then less fail for threads usage 5-8)...
All that makes sense right now is to buy a $100.00 1045t thuban x6 and get it to 4 GHz like I did, and pop in a Piledriver 8320 and sell the old one for $90.00 costing me maybe $100 to get a 23% improvement if that. (Thuban's northbridge overclocking saw 15% improvement where bulldozer's northbridge overclocking saw 5% closing the gap too much between bulldozer vs thuban yet no reviewers other than maybe 1 reviewer was able to realize the importance of this...
It will still never make sense to buy a piledriver new, it will only make sense for am3+ compatible drop in upgrades for cheapskates like me. While AMD says they can't compete with intel high performance, my bet is that it will trickle up to that point while AMD tries to remain silent about it, they need to continue pushing more cores, try to make their modules even smaller and find a way to show value and hope that at least 5 threads can be used in a given situation since their scaling really starts at 5 threads or more compared to hyperthreading.
Honestly I probably will move my Thuban X6 to Sandy Bridge-E and be done with it. I just see them making gradual progress within 3-5 years time where they might pull ahead 5% when 8-12 threads are used with 300 Watts extra power usage and $10 more on my electric bill and $75 less platform cost even then its still not worth it I lose on my power bill lol. But that's the trend their going after, to be within 20% core size of sandy, 30% less in single threaded, but same or 5% lower or 5% better in multithreaded their scaling comes from thread usage 5-8 compared to intel....gets interesting for cheapskates to save $75.00 on platform cost but you sacrifice power, light threading and no app uses single threading anyway I think even office and chrome/internet explorer / just about everything uses between 2-4 threads or more so I dunno...
I see interesting stuff happening with OpenCL / GPU accelerated processing, you'll probably start to see AMD scrap their FPUs one by one until we have 3 FPUs for every 8 integer cores with an embedded GPU in every single processor they sell, then start pushing more cores and maybe give enthusiasts an option to go dual socket for 16+ cores who knows, maybe Battlefield 4 will have 300 player counts and use 16 or more cores maybe then I'll start to care lol.
We all seem to want to love AMD and hate Intel for the evil bastards they are but if Haswell is 20% better and AMD can't top that with every new release we'll just be lucky to have a willing buyer for AMD to keep competitive options available. People act like, OH, AMD IS DOING JUST FINE, but, I worked for a failing company (Sprint)...they have the most miserable employees who get highly underpaid and who talk openly about how much they hate their job, they are in debt billions and find creative ways to juggle debt like selling their towers only to have their cell towers leased back to them like AMD selling their Fabs (which would be interesting if they have Globo and TSMC producing chips giving them higher yields if they could replicate fabrication on both ends, who knows) Usually we don't hear about employers like Washington Mutual failing until you casually stroll in to work just to find the doors shut, go home and watch tv only to find out you've been laid off by a company who failed that did everything in their power to juggle their debt and hide their failure, people don't understand that companies like AMD will do everything they can until the very end but you won't know where it ends because they won't spill the beans on failure until it actually happens. All it takes is a few more releases and further IPC decline we honestly don't know if Intel will keep it up with topping an extra 5% against AMD until maybe 4 years from now AMD is 50%+ behind in IPC. Cyrix processors ceased to exist when their IPC was 50% that of Intels, and yet AMD is slipping in and out of being that far behind yet it's obvious they'll go back to 30% with Piledriver and I'm happy for that, Steamroller will work against Haswell but will be released 6-8 months later (we hope) in 8 threads vs 8 threads we can hope for closer performance but only really in those tough workloads (for now) unless AMD gets real creative I don't doubt AMD is capable, hey if you can't kill them in IPC kill them in multicore scaling, but we'll see.
With scandals within the banking failures usually you only really knew the company failed (starting with washington mutual) when you casually stroll in to work just to find the doors locked and the lights off only to go home, turn on CNN, and find out you no longer have a job lol). People act like AMD does just fine but maybe Intel figures out how to make a GPU and we see that happen to AMD selling out who knows, conspiracy theory here but I'll give it 50/50 that AMD follows the route of Cyrix frankly I don't think it will happen in the next 10 years but I just think it's funny to an extent lol that these things *CAN* happen like this, that's all I'm saying.
Anyway enough with my rant you get my point Intel's not gonna lower their prices for 95% of their consumers just to attack AMD's 5% market share but enthusiasts might actually start to see 8 threads vs 8 threads be within 5% over intel's 8 threads with a BD module being 20% bigger than Sandy and maybe we get both TSMC and Globo do make chips at the same time who knows maybe AMD has something when they start packing in 5 or 6 modules where they start to beat 6 core Intel's with hyperthreading then we see 8 core intels for lower prices and software advancing to use all available threads, AMD maintaining market share and appealing to "value enthusiasts" consumers still win with software and hardware advancement in that regaurd, but AMD honestly only appeals right now to poor people on foodstamps if saving $75.00 on platform cost is for you than go AMD. I was pretty pretty poor months ago and built a thuban X6 @ 4 GHz I couldn't be happier with it I only see the awesome performance in BF3 using all 6 threads all else = lol but I saved $80.00 in platform cost w00000t!!!
Edited by Kancel21 - 7/23/12 at 1:10pm
