AMD ships first Bulldozer processors
Bulldozer - apparently not coming to a desktop PC near you any time soon.
AMD says it's already shipping the processor to system builders, and that it expects Interlagos-based systems to be available in the fourth quarter of 2011.
AMD made no mention of the Opteron 4200 series in its announcement, however, and the Valencia codename was conspicuously absent. Valencia is another F1 Grand Prix track, in case you’re not a fan, and it follows on from AMD’s 12-core Opteron 6174, which was codenamed Magny-Cours after the now-retired French Grand Prix track.
Interestingly, however, AMD also claims that ‘many of the initial shipments have been earmarked for large custom supercomputer installations that are now underway.’
Sadly, there’s no mention of the desktop flavour of Bulldozer, though, which is codenamed Zambezi. We originally expected to see Bulldozer CPUs appearing with the launch of the AMD 990FX chipset and Socket AM3+ releases back in April and May, but the continued delays indicate that yields of the new die might not have met AMD's expectations.
Are you encouraged by the news that AMD is finally shipping some Bulldozer CPUs, or are you worried that this might become another Phenom ‘true quad-core’ debacle? Let us know in the forum.
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Discuss in the forums ReplyI am so tempted just to get a 2500K and have done with it but I know I will kick myself hard if AMD do pull it out of the bag.
For the love of god AMD at least get some benchmarks out so we can all know if the wait will be worth it.
I just want one 8150 for my new Sabretooth! Come on AMD, get them out there.
You know what that means though... when Intel found their 'gem', they were more than happy to leak as much info on their c2d to persuade people to wait and buy their new product.
That's exactly what worries me, I feel if it was going to be really good they would be shouting from the rooftops by now which in turn might actually stop people from buying Intel now.
On the positive side of pesimism, hopefully they've not released bench's due to hoping to get the jump on intel. Did they ever release bench's for the athlon 64 (back in the netburst day's)?
Read them and weep.....30% slower clock for clock than SB.....
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QLn9rR2rn5oJ:www.sisoftware.net/?d=qa&f=cpu_amd_bulldozer&l=en&a=+sisoftware+bulldozer&cd=2&hl=de&ct=clnk&gl=de&client=firefox-a
How did you get hold of that article? It's pretty depressing if it's true - Intel will be able to charge what they like for Ivy Bridge and SB-E as it looks like Bulldozer can't even compete with this generation.
So frankly, with the exception of things like some server workloads (database operations, some HTPC work, fileserving and a few others) I'd expect the bulldozer chips to perform worse clock for clock by a fair margin in most desktop workloads, as most are either single threaded, lightly threaded and/or FP operations.
So for some servers, the new bulldozer chips actually make sense. For a desktop they are going to better than the old K10 and K10.5 architecture by quite a bit. Compared to SB, I frankly expect them to be a big dissapointment, though some parts may be cheaper than equivelent SB chips (I wouldn't even hold my breath on that frankly).
Against SB-E, well AMD has pretty much already said they aren't competing against it. Against Ivy Bridge, we'll see, but if Intel's talk holds up, IB is going to be far and away faster than SB with the 3D transistors in its process shrink. That leaves Bulldozer holding the bag in just a few months (maybe by early spring, could be earlier). At best Bulldozer seems like it MAY be better in some highly threaded workload scenarios (seemingly in the minority for desktop workloads) than an SB chip, and SB-E and not too much later IB are going to pull past it like a track star against a fat kid running for a candy bar.
I know AMD can't just give up on the large market shares like low/mid desktop parts, but I almost wish they'd focus in areas they might be able to beat the pants of Intel in. The E350 trashes Atom like mad, and bulldozer does sound like it'll make a lot of sense for some server types. Against mid and upper end desktop parts, Llano and Bulldozer just don't seem like they hold water. I almost wish AMD would give up and do their darndest to create really chip, really low power, really great performance per watt chips for the low end desktop, SOHO server and regular server market and just try to give up on the mid and high end desktop market. An improved architecture llano really could conquer the sub $150 desktop CPU market. An improved E350 (and other low end CPU) could dominate netbook, HTPC and SOHO servers (and with the right tweaks and low power part might even make a killer tablet processor).
Just my 2 cents. In some ways I am an Intel fanboi. I used to use AMD parts exclusively way back in the single core days (Intel Celeron 433 for me, after that all AMD parts until my latest Core 2 E7500 a couple of years ago), but since Intel kicked AMD up between the legs on performance, I haven't been able to concious buying a lower performing part when it doesn't even cost much less. Well, actually I do have a Sempron 140 in my file server, but even that looks like it might get dumped for the new Intel Celeron low power dual core part as it has significantly lower power draw and is dirt cheap (hard to argue with sub $50 price).
Whoever wrote that "article" was an idiot, if your going to fake something at least do get the facts of the known comparison chip right.
There is no 4 core sandy bridge chip that's got hyper threading (i.e a i7), a base clock speed of 3.0ghz with a turbo of 3.6..
Unless I have got the wrong end of the stick my Core i7 is a Quad core with hyper-threading or whatever its called presenting 8 cores to both OSX and Win7
This link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Bridge#Desktop_processors would also suggest you are slightly wrong as well.
Kimbie
I was quoting there stats on a specific processor they were supposedly testing, and you link just proves my point, there's no 3.0ghz i7...
How this pans out in desktop workloads won't be known until it's benchmarked.
The reason that there are no benches yet is because AMD's NDA is a LOT tighter than Intel's.
Indeed. We've seen the same thing with their GPUs, which have generally been excellent.
Too little, far too late.
+1
I'm pretty much sold on setting up the fairly standard and affordable 2500K system, but it seems silly not to wait a little longer until the benchmarks are available, just in case I can save myself a bit for the same performance. It does seem like a very long wait mind you.
yep, agree with that.
Not if they're delaying it because Bulldozer isn't as good as Sandy Bridge.
I personally hope it's an absolute monster of a chip, it's the final component to go in to Saturday Night special, although the 1100T in it now does a good job.
Why would Intel delay Ivy Bridge cos bulldozer isn't as good as sandy bridge? Please explain?
Yes they've already spent that on Ivy Bridge, but by delaying it (if Sandybridge is better than Bulldozer), they can delay the investment into what comes after sandy bridge while still raking in revenue from it.