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BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

Agreed posted:

Power consumption makes the question of how good they are at overclocking more complex. For starters, the FX 8150 BE (3.6GHz stock) draws about 240W stock, compared to 130ish for the 2600K and 2500K at their 3.4GHz and 3.3GHz stock speeds. The FX 8150 goes over 400W once you get them to 4.5GHz+, compared to Sandy Bridge which are hanging out around 200W at 4.6GHz.

That's when really loaded down, obviously, but still, the power consumption comparison and clock for clock performance deficit means why would anyone build an FX chip system if they aren't an AMD supporter regardless?

Jesus, I never knew the power draws for Bulldozer chips was so drat high :stare: Pretty sure my next build is going to Intel again (had all AMD up until my current PC) unless AMD pulls some crazy 180 and starts whipping rear end on Intel like they did back in the A64 days.

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Chortles
Dec 29, 2008

Ozz81 posted:

Jesus, I never knew the power draws for Bulldozer chips was so drat high :stare: Pretty sure my next build is going to Intel again (had all AMD up until my current PC) unless AMD pulls some crazy 180 and starts whipping rear end on Intel like they did back in the A64 days.
:catstare: And I thought my 965 BE (TDP 125 W) was bad enough to merit a Hyper 212 Plus...

Count me in on the Intel bandwagon (also been all AMD up to now) for my next build... assuming I can find deals on them low enough to justify it (missed the boat on a i5-2500K for $150 from Microcenter).

Beef
Jul 26, 2004
News around town is that AMD will probably pull out of the desktop market:

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_19358655

Agreed
Dec 30, 2003

The price of meat has just gone up, and your old lady has just gone down

Beef posted:

News around town is that AMD will probably pull out of the desktop market:

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_19358655

Well, that's a loving nightmare.

HalloKitty
Sep 30, 2005

Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast
Abandon x86? What happened to AMD's "x86 everywhere"?

I think this is a mess, and there's no doubt that Bulldozer in its current state not at all competitive, but they're not a million miles away..

They need to hang on and squirt out a competitive CPU. This is kind of sad.

I hope they don't drag ATI down with them, because there's no doubt ATI has been producing quality cards at an excellent price point.

ATI must make money, they have a wide spread of market share - look at the Xbox 360 and the Wii, ATI GPUs..

WhyteRyce
Dec 30, 2001

quote:

AMD might make chips based on both the x86 and ARM designs, some experts have speculated. But if it switches exclusively to ARM, it would leave Intel essentially alone in the x86 business, which "would make Intel kind of look like they are the guy that missed the meeting," said tech analyst Rob Enderle.

I love tech analysts

HalloKitty
Sep 30, 2005

Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

WhyteRyce posted:

I love tech analysts

Yeah, I thought that was comical. Intel would be free to dominate at any price. x86 isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

Star War Sex Parrot
Oct 2, 2003

HardOCP readers ask AMD 10 questions about Bullzoder.

It's sad to watch them still trying to spin this.

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams

Star War Sex Parrot posted:

HardOCP readers ask AMD 10 questions about Bullzoder.

It's sad to watch them still trying to spin this.

Holy poo poo.

Question: Why should I buy BD when Phenom chips for $100 less show better in bechmarks?
Answer: FUTURE!

BlackMK4
Aug 23, 2006

wat.
Megamarm

FISHMANPET posted:

Holy poo poo.

Question: Why should I buy BD when Phenom chips for $100 less show better in bechmarks?
Answer: FUTURE!

Seriously, there are no words.

quote:

7. Why would I buy a $275 Bulldozer cpu when the $170 1090t seems to equal its performance or actually do better at every benchmark and game we've seen?

Adam Kozak, Product Marketing Manager, AMD - We understand our customers make purchase decisions based on how they use their PCs, and in many cases our AMD Phenom™ II processors are a great (purchase).

For those ready for a more modern architecture, who want a desktop for high resolution gaming and to tackle time intensive tasks with newer multi-threaded applications, the AMD FX processor is a great upgrade.

WHAT?

HalloKitty
Sep 30, 2005

Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast
I don't think I can even bear to read it. Poor AMD.

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

I think people are missing the fact they did increase performance in a limited set of tasks by quite a bit. Even if the 'general' performance didn't increase, and is in some cases slightly slower. Remember the Pentium Pro?

quote:

8. What specific or general computing roles do you see BD excelling in? For instance virtualization, Windows 8, solitaire, etc?
:haw:

quote:

Adam Kozak, Product Marketing Manager, AMD - We’re seeing great results at stock frequencies with HD content creation, file processing, image processing, and high resolution gaming environments. Most of these applications are multi-core aware, and some have even begun to use new instructions to further enhance performance on AMD FX processor systems.
True.

quote:


10. We have seen in some benchmarks that this cpu can be a multithreaded beast. I understand that Battlefield 3 and future games will use multithreaded DirectX11 drivers. Do you believe that Zambezi will have any performance advantages over the competition in this area given the extreme multithreaded nature of the chip? And are you working with Dice and or other Developers on similar optimizations for future game and multimedia titles?

Gabe Gravning, Senior Product Marketing Manager, AMD - The question is not "will this transition to multithreaded applications happen" but rather "how soon?" AMD drove this same type of inflection point in the industry with 64-bit computing and APU platforms.

It’s clear that application multithreading, including the multithreading advancements in DirectX 11 are the future, and the "Bulldozer" architecture is the bridge to that future. We see a great opportunity for AMD to lead the industry to a multi-threaded future, just as we have in the past. That will most definitely require tight collaboration with the software developer community.

Nice try, but does anyone thing multi-threaded enhancements in DX11 are really going to improve things that much? It almost reminds me of 3DNow! and the K6, where you'd see about 30% improvement but only in the couple games with support.

BlackMK4
Aug 23, 2006

wat.
Megamarm
Thinking about it now, what did you expect? AMD has nothing to gain by admitting a flop and everything to lose by doing so. It gives people words from their own mouth to hang them with, it'll get more media attention, etc.

Gunshow Poophole
Sep 14, 2008

OMBUDSMAN
POSTERS LOCAL 42069




Star War Sex Parrot posted:

HardOCP readers ask AMD 10 questions about Bullzoder.

It's sad to watch them still trying to spin this.

I know barely anything about processor engineering and I can recognize a poo poo sandwich when its being fed to me. What a ridiculous crop of marketing-speak.

Agreed
Dec 30, 2003

The price of meat has just gone up, and your old lady has just gone down

They chose to engage the community. Granted, silence would have been just as damning, but they are, it appears, pretty solidly hosed, and they're just doing what they have to. Going through the motions of promoting a new product that they spent years on which sucks. They don't have Intel's massive treasury to float them or stance in the industry to bend people into using the product regardless through shady bundling deals and outright anti-competitive measures, so they can't just do the P4 thing and keep banging their heads on this processor until they can do something better and different. They're hosed. Some Bulldozer chips will end up in servers or clusters or supercomputers, cool, but AMD is not looking great. Everyone knows it, including them, but they still have to act under the premise that it's a going concern, reality be damned. You're in business (or a market segment, or whatever) until you're not. So it goes.

If AMD gets out of the desktop market, where does that leave Intel? I know we talked about how recent and current administrations haven't exactly been heavy on enforcement of monopoly busting but come on, if Intel has -no- competitors in the desktop market and absolutely marginal competition in servers, do they just... get away with it? Or what?

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

Agreed posted:

If AMD gets out of the desktop market, where does that leave Intel? I know we talked about how recent and current administrations haven't exactly been heavy on enforcement of monopoly busting but come on, if Intel has -no- competitors in the desktop market and absolutely marginal competition in servers, do they just... get away with it? Or what?

What are the sheer odds that a startup could make an x86 chip?

Are they greater than another platform coming along (ARM+Linux or something) and helping tablets/etc kill the desktops? Will desktop PC's remain a niche for content developers, power users, and business computing?

Zhentar
Sep 28, 2003

Brilliant Master Genius

Bob Morales posted:

What are the sheer odds that a startup could make an x86 chip?

Ignoring the prerequisite of licensing x86 from Intel and x86-64 from AMD, it's still pretty much zero. Bulldozer took AMD 6-7 years to design with a lot of engineers (hundreds?) with x86 design experience to build off of. Making something competitive with Intel would require a huge, long term investment, and given Intel's process lead, there's a pretty high risk you end up about as competitive as Bulldozer at the end. So Intel would really have to go nuts with monopoly abuse to give an x86 startup a fighting chance.

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

It's a shame we don't have companies like Cyrix or NexGen around anymore.

At least we still have VIA!

You Am I
May 20, 2001

Me @ your poasting

Bob Morales posted:

It's a shame we don't have companies like Cyrix or NexGen around anymore.

At least we still have VIA!
Well VIA is pretty well using old Cyrix designs

Nintendo Kid
Aug 4, 2011

by Smythe

Bob Morales posted:

What are the sheer odds that a startup could make an x86 chip?

Are they greater than another platform coming along (ARM+Linux or something) and helping tablets/etc kill the desktops? Will desktop PC's remain a niche for content developers, power users, and business computing?

"Desktop PCs" really includes laptops you know.

And there's massive inertia in the market too, it's not as if everyone buys a new computer yearly, many people only buy once every 5 years or so. Let's say starting tomorrow morning no x86/x86-64 computers ever sold ever again, and people who were buying them are all buying ipads and android tablets - it would take 4, maybe 5 years for those to outnumber x86/x86-64 computers and probably a decade to eclipse them fully.

Malloc Voidstar
May 7, 2007

Fuck the cowboys. Unf. Fuck em hard.

AMD posted:

AMD is a leader in x86 microprocessor design, and we remain committed to the x86 market. Our strategy is to accelerate our growth by taking advantage of our design capabilities to deliver a breadth of products that best align with broader industry shifts toward low power, emerging markets and the cloud.
http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/29/2596978/amd-committed-to-x86

Slider
Jun 6, 2004

POINTS
Is bulldozer actually any faster in games compared to the old phenom II chips? Newegg has the fx-4100 for 120 bucks and it doesn't seem like a bad deal if you buy a 212+ and overclock it. I know the heat/power consumption sucks, but a quad core 4.5ghz processor if you're on a budget doesn't seem that terrible to me.

Longinus00
Dec 29, 2005
Ur-Quan

This doesn't refute the claim that they're pulling out of the desktop x86 market.

Slider posted:

Is bulldozer actually any faster in games compared to the old phenom II chips? Newegg has the fx-4100 for 120 bucks and it doesn't seem like a bad deal if you buy a 212+ and overclock it. I know the heat/power consumption sucks, but a quad core 4.5ghz processor if you're on a budget doesn't seem that terrible to me.

Short answer: No.

VorpalFish
Mar 22, 2007
reasonably awesometm

Slider posted:

Is bulldozer actually any faster in games compared to the old phenom II chips? Newegg has the fx-4100 for 120 bucks and it doesn't seem like a bad deal if you buy a 212+ and overclock it. I know the heat/power consumption sucks, but a quad core 4.5ghz processor if you're on a budget doesn't seem that terrible to me.

It is a bad deal. For a gaming machine, you'd be infinitely better off with a sandy bridge 2100.

Malloc Voidstar
May 7, 2007

Fuck the cowboys. Unf. Fuck em hard.

Longinus00 posted:

This doesn't refute the claim that they're pulling out of the desktop x86 market.
Seeing as it directly says they are realigning to low power processors, even if they aren't pulling out of x86 they won't really be much competition for Intel anymore.

Nintendo Kid
Aug 4, 2011

by Smythe

Aleksei Vasiliev posted:

Seeing as it directly says they are realigning to low power processors, even if they aren't pulling out of x86 they won't really be much competition for Intel anymore.

As if they're much competition for Intel anyway?

Ryokurin
Jul 14, 2001

Wanna Die?
They may very well be, as that market is going to get smaller over the years or at the very least become harder and harder to justify an upgrade every 2-3 years as it has been. Either way I don't see it happening in the near (that is the next year) as the alternatives still need work. It would be different if they didn't sell off their ARM division a few years back, still made their own memory instead of rebranding or had someone who could execute their low powered chip production properly. They owe it to their shareholders and their future to take a hard look at where they see things going.

Nintendo Kid
Aug 4, 2011

by Smythe

Ryokurin posted:

They may very well be, as that market is going to get smaller over the years or at the very least become harder and harder to justify an upgrade every 2-3 years as it has been. Either way I don't see it happening in the near (that is the next year) as the alternatives still need work. It would be different if they didn't sell off their ARM division a few years back, still made their own memory instead of rebranding or had someone who could execute their low powered chip production properly. They owe it to their shareholders and their future to take a hard look at where they see things going.

There really isn't a good reason to assume the market for x86 computers is going to get smaller, only that it will continue to get bigger while other stuff also gets bigger faster, but without reducing the x86 market.

Just Another Lurker
May 1, 2009

Is this going to lead to Intel slowing it's pace of innovation leading to stagnation for the CPU market?

Still have my old K6(now sadly deceased) somewhere in the house.

Agreed
Dec 30, 2003

The price of meat has just gone up, and your old lady has just gone down

Just Another Lurker posted:

Is this going to lead to Intel slowing it's pace of innovation leading to stagnation for the CPU market?

Still have my old K6(now sadly deceased) somewhere in the house.

Well, normally I'd say if they do that, AMD will have the opening it needs, but Intel aren't poised to slip up because even total outsiders like us can see that they're winning big time and they just need to keep stride. And even if they did, AMD doesn't seem to have much of an opportunity to get the opening it needs because they're so invested in this architecture and sort of desperately betting on future performance improvements that would, at best, bring them in line with Intel's previous generation for performance, at a substantial cost in power efficiency.

Scuttling Global Foundries and all the trouble with TSMC's process shrink, plus the really poor performance compared to expectations of Bulldozer mean that it's going to be really hard for AMD to pull a Thunderbird here even if Intel screws the pooch somehow. Intel is having success to a much greater degree, their 32nm shrink had chipset issues, not chip issues. No serious concerns yet about the 22nm Ivy Bridge shrink. Great profits reported.

AMD wins netbooks and gets put in some very specialized highly parallel workload applications but they're losing desktops big time.

I sure as hell hope that they don't drag ATI down with them. I haven't read anything that suggests other than that AMD managed to win all three consoles in the next generation, which should be a serious cash cow for them but on the whole AMD are just eating poo poo by the handful and taking punch after punch, bad times.

Agreed fucked around with this message at 02:14 on Nov 30, 2011

Ryokurin
Jul 14, 2001

Wanna Die?

Install Gentoo posted:

There really isn't a good reason to assume the market for x86 computers is going to get smaller, only that it will continue to get bigger while other stuff also gets bigger faster, but without reducing the x86 market.

I was talking more about the desktop computer market than just the x86. Notebooks already outsell Desktops and Tablets will eventually become a bigger part of the market. Desktops won't go away but they will be more of a server role, or for heavy duty tasks that need a higher resolution or power than the average Notebook/Tablet can provide.

Ragingsheep
Nov 7, 2009
Does the ARM version of Win8 need specifically complied binaries or can it run x86 code?

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.
A couple years ago, just before I graduated, I happened across an AMD engineer alum who was recruiting at my school's electrical and computer engineering program. He was packing up but was glad to give the elevator version of his recruiting pitch and flip through the Powerpoint a bit.

I noted AMD's GPU strategy of competing with what were, in essence, highly scaleable midrange parts, and I asked if a similar strategy was going to come into the CPU market and help bridge the (ca. 2008) performance gap with Intel. Or if they would push harder on the low-end market and try to usurp mass-market computing.

The guy just... shut down. Like, his eyes kinda went vacant, he said that AMD didn't see its processors as second best, and the conversation, which had been fairly lively as these things go, just ended.

In retrospect, that was a lot more meaningful than I thought at the time.

Ryokurin
Jul 14, 2001

Wanna Die?

Ragingsheep posted:

Does the ARM version of Win8 need specifically complied binaries or can it run x86 code?

ARM will only run metro (WinRT) applications.

kapinga
Oct 12, 2005

I am not a number

Ragingsheep posted:

Does the ARM version of Win8 need specifically complied binaries or can it run x86 code?

Win8 will not include an x86 emulator, no.

We don't know much, but the ARM version probably only has the desktop so that key parts of Windows (i.e. the old control panel, task manager, whatever other nuts and bolts are in there) can be accessed. MS's plan is that ARM apps will be Metro and released through the App store. This fits in with the ARM is for tablets mentality, which should work well with Metro. Metro apps can only be delivered through the app store (work arounds for companies to distribute apps internally will be available)

It is not clear if compatible binaries not delivered through the App store will run. This will certainly be worked around if not.

edit: f,b and much more succinctly.

Nintendo Kid
Aug 4, 2011

by Smythe

Ryokurin posted:

I was talking more about the desktop computer market than just the x86. Notebooks already outsell Desktops and Tablets will eventually become a bigger part of the market. Desktops won't go away but they will be more of a server role, or for heavy duty tasks that need a higher resolution or power than the average Notebook/Tablet can provide.

Well desktops have been outsold by notebooks since 2005 or so and if I remember right they're currently about 65% of computer sales, might even be 70% or more.

And frankly AMD has done even worse in laptops than they have in desktops, since the whole power usage problem is especially apparent and annoying when you have a battery and that lasts shorter and thing you're touching directly that heats up more.

WhyteRyce
Dec 30, 2001

Install Gentoo posted:

Well desktops have been outsold by notebooks since 2005 or so and if I remember right they're currently about 65% of computer sales, might even be 70% or more.

And frankly AMD has done even worse in laptops than they have in desktops, since the whole power usage problem is especially apparent and annoying when you have a battery and that lasts shorter and thing you're touching directly that heats up more.

Intel is going to be pushing ultrabooks hard, too

Spiderdrake
May 12, 2001



Didn't AMD make gains in notebooks and release chips people actually want to buy as opposed to their desktop plan of sucking on every possible level? Several benchmarks show the power / battery life of Llano is pretty much fine.

They just, you know, can't ship enough product.

Factory Factory posted:

The guy just... shut down. Like, his eyes kinda went vacant, he said that AMD didn't see its processors as second best, and the conversation, which had been fairly lively as these things go, just ended.
This really lines up with everything written about them. It's sad seeing a company mismanage itself out of a market, but then Intel hasn't exactly been forgiving for the last five years.

Nintendo Kid
Aug 4, 2011

by Smythe

Spiderdrake posted:

Didn't AMD make gains in notebooks and release chips people actually want to buy as opposed to their desktop plan of sucking on every possible level? Several benchmarks show the power / battery life of Llano is pretty much fine.

They just, you know, can't ship enough product.
This really lines up with everything written about them. It's sad seeing a company mismanage itself out of a market, but then Intel hasn't exactly been forgiving for the last five years.

They've made minor gains, but an AMD notebook is still all but guaranteed to perform worse and run shorter on battery than a similarly priced Intel. Being "fine" doesn't help against "great".

IIRC Intel only dipped from 86% of laptops to 85% recently.

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Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.
Hold on, wait, what?

AMD is entering the DDR3 SDRAM market.

Is this not a big deal or did it completely slip this thread by?

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