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Everyone is blaming GloFo for that. AMD was aiming for higher clockspeeds to offset the decreased IPC like Netburst did.

(10-29-2011, 04:59 PM)lamedude Wrote: [ -> ]Everyone is blaming GloFo for that. AMD was aiming for higher clockspeeds to offset the decreased IPC like Netburst did.

And why did AMD thought that an architecture similar to Netburst is an example worthy to be followed in the first place?

Quote:That's pathetic. AMD can't beat its own CPUs?

In single threaded performance no.

Microprocessors take 5-6 years to design, AMD began working on bulldozer in 2005. Companies have to predict how software and hardware will be used in the future and design there hardware around these predictions. AMD apparently predicted that most applications would be very heavily multithreaded by now and so focusing on throughput would be the best course of action, well it turns out they were wrong. 16 pipelines in 8 cores (8 narrow cores) achieve a higher throughput per watt than 16 pipelines in 4 cores (4 wide cores), but only if those 8 cores are all being heavily used. Bulldozer does manage to compete with sandy bridge in heavily multithreaded software, which is an accomplishment, it just fails to deliver what most software actually needs.

Pretty good article on what happened:
http://semiaccurate.com/2011/10/17/why-did-bulldozer-underwhelm/
http://semiaccurate.com/2011/10/17/bulldozer-doesnt-have-just-a-single-problem/

so... if software was made to be multithreaded then Bulldozer would be a lot more useful?

doesn't that mean the average user would never get any benefits with this CPU since a fair amount don't have multithreading?

Exactly. Although sandy bridge achieves the same multithreaded performance with less power consumption and also has better cache performance and floating point performance. Bulldozer is priced too high for desktops but could make a decent 16 core server cpu if the price is right.

I really would recommend reading that article. Even though it has a few parts that I disagree with and I generally don't like semiaccurate news articles since they tend to be extremely biased this one was pretty well written.

Bulldozer could be useful for people who renders animations and the ones does heavy movie editing I guess (Which also includes rendering)
Also the guys who use stuff like Realflow and FumeFX, if it's cheaper than a SandyBridge.

It has no real advantage against sandy bridge. It's priced similarly to sandy bridge (no price advantage). In performs worse than sandy bridge in the vast majority of applications and even if you're running one of the few applications where it is on par with sandy bridge in performance it requires more power consumption to achieve the same performance. Plus it does not have an integrated GPU.

Then again phenom (K10) had all of these same problems when it was released. The 2.4GHz phenom 9700 was outperformed by the 3.2GHz Athlon X2 from the year before by about 10% on average, and they were 20% slower in single threaded applications. Phenoms massively underperformed core 2 quad across the board while consuming more power yet they priced them about the same as core 2 quad for the first year, making it pointless to buy them.

(11-01-2011, 03:30 AM)Runo Wrote: [ -> ]Bulldozer could be useful for people who renders animations and the ones does heavy movie editing I guess (Which also includes rendering)
Also the guys who use stuff like Realflow and FumeFX, if it's cheaper than a SandyBridge.

no it couldn't.

it gets raped by my 920 in cinebench.

Yeah I said that considering a price advantage, but then again NaturalViolence said there is none.
meh, AMD just made another fuck-up.

the team that made the Athlon64 no longer works at AMD, also amd has switched to using SOC box designs instead of hand crafting the core. this in itself makes things 20% slower.