Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Locked thread
Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

Maggot Monster posted:

I apparently had a different experience to you guys because every loving nvidia chipset board I had would cause endless and bizarre problems. The worst of the lot was after I put together some Shuttle/nforce3 computer that would destroy harddrives.

I send the drive back and get a replacement - it eats the replacement. I send that back and get another replacement and it eats that one. We're all a bit baffled at this point so I try with a couple of older disks - it destroys those.

Anyway, to cut a boring story shorter the fix was to flash the firmware on the cd-rom drive in order for it to stop destroying hard drives. It made no sense at all and the assumption was that the cd drive was putting garbage onto the ATA bus and breaking things in some crazy kind of way.

I always had weird nforce issues like that, from network to i/o errors, across three different desktops.

I had some bad problems with one type of nforce board that was running my expensive dual core. I had similar problems to some other posters in that my case was so full of hardware that it had very poor air circulation, and a lot of heat output in the case. I'm not making the same mistakes again. I avoid nvidia chipsets and I don't fully load cases.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

Alereon posted:

It's unfortunate but understandable that Fusion APUs are ending up in low-end laptops rather than the netbooks they'd be perfect for.

I recommended a fusion laptop to one of the guys in the office for the low end cheap laptop for his family to use. Initially his kids moaned at him for buying a lovely laptop, but once they started using it all the moaning went away. Between it having enough cpu and gpu to actually do stuff and the 4.5 hour battery life they're pretty happy with it.

AMD will do pretty well once they release their entire range of fusion chips as indicated in the slides.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

Alereon posted:

The actual problem for AMD appears to have been that Bulldozer couldn't scale to high enough clockspeeds to offer competitive per-thread performance, which is what has always been the big risk of going with >4 core CPUs.

The clockspeed is one issue. However, I had a look at the article and there's one thing that sticks in my mind. The main feature of this architecture that I see is going from 3 to 4 decode units. That will certainly provide some improvement with the theoretical best being a 33% increase in instructions converted to microcode per clock cycle, but it is also a limit.

I'm wondering when AMD will provide a 5 module unit, and the corresponding 5 decoders. Though this could be linked to the current limits of memory speed.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

PC LOAD LETTER posted:

x86 is pretty IPC limited, IIRC the Athlon had 3 decoders and only averaged around 1.5 IPC thorough put. 4 is already overkill, adding a 5th would be a waste. Resources would probably be better spent on a bigger/faster cache or branch prediction or improving clockspeed. I don't believe memory bandwidth is an issue right now either, almost nothing seems to be limited by it for desktop workloads.

For desktop everything is cpu limited. There are specific scientific or engineering applications where memory bandwidth is a limiting factor, even then it only appeared when I started using Xeon 5520's.

The thing is with the new architecture is that it's modular. When you add a decoder you're adding the ALUs and FPU in the module as well. In theory you could process more assuming you don't have other bottlenecks appearing and making it ineffective.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

dud root posted:

So if a new stepping respin fixes the clock issues, could there be anything architecturally wrong with the chip?

It all looks good in theory but it's hard to know what they're actually fixing. Is it a process issue, have they found actual bugs in the B0 and B1 steppings, or do they need to tweak the chip layout so that it works at higher clock speeds.

Given they're going to stepping B2 instead of redesigning the chip from scratch it seems like there isn't a major architectural issue.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

JawnV6 posted:

I'm waiting on the network more often than the CPU. I think the Android emulator's one of the few cpu-bound tasks I still have.

Thanks for the other comments as they help shed some light on what might be going on at AMD.

For the desktop loads I was referring to typical home desktop loads (which for me means gaming as other tasks don't use much cpu).

My work workloads are very memory intensive and for future upgrades I want faster memory. If I shifted the workload to multiple computers it would easily saturate network bandwidth. When cpus were a lot slower neither network or memory bandwidth was a problem for the stuff that I do.

Devian666 fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Jun 2, 2011

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe
I haven't had any issues with running computational stuff using the linux catalyst drivers. Is there a specific application that you need other drivers?

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

Longinus00 posted:

That's just testing graphics performance, I see nothing there about compute. If I'm going to have to run Catalyst I'll just reboot into windows where it's faster anyway.


No, I was just looking playing around with it. What is it currently being programmed in?

The gpgpu stuff is in opencl. The stream processors are being included in all new and CPUs so the code will be portable from the gpus. Though for support you'll probably need catalyst drivers initially to make use of opencl on them.

I'm still learning some of this stuff so I might be slightly out with some details.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

Tab8715 posted:

Aleron, where the hell do you get all this information?

If you follow all the hardware news closely you hear about a lot of this. The philosophy of the ps3 was discussed a lot around the time it was released. That all dates back a long time now. The use of SPEs seemed like a good idea at the time, but between yields and an SPE dedicated to the PS3 OS it didn't end up like what was promised.

Cell processors weren't the next big thing but all three consoles use processors based on the technology, and at least two will continue to use the technology in their next consoles.

If AMD can deliver a CPU that can handle the PS4 encryption without being a bottleneck they may win the contract.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

Star War Sex Parrot posted:

Last I heard, late August for desktop Bulldozer parts. Server chips should be out any day now.

Last I heard bulldozer was September but I won't be complaining if they turn up earlier. This is still one of the more interesting cpu developments in a long time.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

freeforumuser posted:

As much as I want AMD to succeed I would take any unofficial benchmarks with a grain of salt for now.

These are also benchmarks on engineering samples. We don't know for sure if these engineering samples are the ones before or after the performance tweaks. I'm still happy to wait for some credible sites to run a wide range of benchmarks.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

Look at the layout. No wonder it's so drat big there's 2 megs of L2 cache and 2 megs of L3 cache per core. I'm guessing this is how they solved the memory bottleneck.

That's a total of 16 megs of cache on die compared with a Phenom X6 with 3 megs of L2 and 6 megs of L3 (total).

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

JawnV6 posted:

Can BD do an L3 chop besides 8M/0M? Or does the cache setup still have that hole if L3 exists and has less space than the combined L2's?

I'm not sure anyone has that information other than AMD's engineers and the motherboard manufacturers.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

JawnV6 posted:

Yeah I guess it's super-hard to scan a product line and see if they're selling anything besides 0M L3 and 8M L3 parts? These threads are normally full of system-builder types who could answer that at a glance.

So difficult that you didn't do this yourself. You could research this and response to the thread.

You may find that any information may be subject to change given that the previous version of the chip didn't perform as expected.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

JawnV6 posted:

Yes. System builders who are constantly shopping for parts and aware of product lines have easier access to this information than I do. I'm seriously asking if anyone's seen a 2, 4, or 6 in the L3 column or if it's all 0 or 8. This shouldn't involve research, it's a yes/no question that I'm sure someone following this thread can answer offhand. I'm not sure why you're being so prickly about this, you didn't even understand the question well enough the first time I asked it to produce a coherent response. Motherboard manufacturers wouldn't have a clue what sizes the L3 can come in and availability of chops is public information.

Sorry for trying to be helpful.

The answer is no at this time as all eight versions are listed with 8 megs of L3 cache. I don't have any information outside of the release versions of the desktop cores.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

Bob Morales posted:

Any day now, right?

:f5:

They delayed until September so let's hope so. It could take a while for stock to be available.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

:ohdear:

So it looks like the good part of their yield is going into the server market. AMD will most likely build up high stock levels of "low end" cpus from the defective chips. A shame they won't be able to sell those until some time after the bulldozer release.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

Corvettefisher posted:

I was fairly sure down the line they planned to push out a 16core desktop cpu

That will be further down the track. They currently don't have enough production or yield to sell any desktop bulldozer processors.

Also, the largest desktop cpus on the bulldozer roadmap have 4 cores/8 cpus.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe
Between reading tomshardware and anandtech I'm satisfied that AMD have almost caught up to their main competitor the Phenom II X6 1100T.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

rscott posted:

Jesus, this is a blunder on the level of Netburst for AMD, and I don't believe they can afford to make a mistake like that. Hopefully the graphics division can keep the company afloat long enough for AMD to either work the kinks out of the process or pull their heads out of their rear end and deliver a product that doesn't have the IPC efficiency of 8 year old parts.

Given that the cpu has APU/Stream processors I wouldn't be surprised if bitcoin miners attempt to prop up sales by buying the cpus.

Turns out they're waiting for the next iteration of the cpu.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=26145.0

Devian666 fucked around with this message at 20:33 on Oct 12, 2011

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe
I can see a lot of people buying them and getting buyers remorse. Then again a large portion probably won't know any better.

I was chatting with my nephew about this release of cpus. He said that he bought a quad core and he didn't even know why. He just had a lot of money to blow on a computer at the time. He doesn't even do video editing or other stuff that would make decent use of the quad core. AMD will get revenue for having the largest 8 core penis substitute. Despite the fact that most people never get beyond using 2 cores.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe
You left out: it has been replaced by the previous generation product at a lower price.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe
The site actually says 40% under specific conditions and not across the board.

In relation to the core usage in windows 7.

quote:

There is most definitely a Windows 7 AMD FX – software patch in the works. By most estimates the AMD Bulldozer FX is underperforming by 40-70% in most Windows 7 benchmarks. By forcing Windows 7 to recognize 8 cpu cores a huge performance hit has happened. The Bulldozer FX-8xxx design… really isn’t 8 cores, it’s a 4 core CPU with an extra integer pipeline on each core. If the FX-8xxx series scale according to the 4 and 6 core Bulldozer design than there is a serious bug in Windows 7 that is crippling the FX-8150 performance.

This is about spreading FPU or SSE around between the cores rather than clogging the APU on one core while another is idle. If the patch works there will be some improvement but it'll be completely dependent on the application/game.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

Cool Matty posted:

Won't that end up doing jack-poo poo for the worst case scenario of Bulldozer: single-core application performance?

Correct. It won't do anything.

So, for example, World of Warcraft where the game is one thread and the audio is a second thread (probably all integer) you'll still get the same terrible performance.

Though there might be some benefit where the gpu offloads to cpu. It would at least offload to an APU that isn't as heavily loaded.

Either way I'll believe results when I see them.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

Longinus00 posted:

Considering how bulldozer is supposed to be made to improve server performance I'm sad that all/most the benchmarks so far have been for desktop apps on windows. Hopefully someone will get their hands on some opterons and start doing those tests.

The only appropriate server testing I've seen on a mainstream site was on anandtech. They expressed interest in testing the bulldozer cores the same way but didn't have any to test.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

wipeout posted:

EDIT - :haw:
http://quinetiam.com/?p=1810

It's a conspiracy by intel.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

HalloKitty posted:

At this point, I guess IE6 is probably slightly less disappointing

There's your thread title.

At this point I've lost all interest in BD. Time to look forward to their next iteration of the processor.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

Arsten posted:

After reading through benchmarks and this thread, my question is "What benefits or spiffy technology are actually in Bulldozer?"

I mean, in two years after they get 5 Ghz in the core design going to be where they get a lot of money out of it, or something? Is there any value here as a processor?

What benefits to the consumer from bulldozer? Questionable benefits at best. Maybe the release inspired intel to announce their next generation of processor, or maybe they are just carrying on the same anyway.

Further on down the track bulldozer will probably be beneficial. The design has a lot more room for development so it will allow for some considerable improvements. This probably will just result it reasonable cheap cpus on the bottom end of the market.

That said I bought a new laptop yesterday with an i3-2310M. AMDs bulldozer inspired that purchase.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe
Total platform cost is an interesting point and for desktop llano vs i3 that's one thing. For laptops in my recent experience is completely different.

I had a choice of an i3-2310M, same i3 with NVidia 520M (for a whole $2 NZD more), or an A4 all for very close prices. As far as I'm aware the A4 doesn't really compare to an i3 in terms of performance so I had a look for an A8 laptop in the same shop. The A8 cost 40% more than the other laptops. For the laptop market llano seems to be in the wrong price range.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

Alereon posted:

That's not really a reasonable comparison, a laptop with an AMD A8 processor is competing with Intel Core i5s, which start from $579 USD on Newegg for an i5 2430M right now. A comparable A8-3800M notebook is only $549, and has twice the cores and much better graphics performance. There's even an A8-3800M notebook with an additional slow HD 6470M 1GB dGPU for only $519, but I'd rather not pay with weight and bettery life. You can get an A6-3400M for $499, which is the same price as an i3 2330M notebook, and again has twice the cores and better graphics performance, but with the added benefit of Turbo over the i3. The AMD A4s are definitely poo poo processors though, given that they don't have the graphics performance leadership or core count to make up for the slow CPU.

The nVidia Geforce 520M is actually SLOWER than HD 3000, the only reason it's included is so you can use applications that aren't compatible with Intel GPUs (and because nVidia is probably giving them away for free at this point). You need a minimum of a Geforce GTX 560M or Radeon HD 6750M before you get performance meaningfully better than integrated graphics. GPUs below this mark have no more memory bandwidth than integrated graphics, and on the nVidia side (and below 6500M on AMD) have only 4 ROPs, which means gaming is off the table.

I'm bummed that we're not seeing more variety of Llano laptops, especially using the MX-series of 45W processors. The higher TDP means markedly better base clock speeds and lower power usage/better battery life (as a rule, the higher the TDP, the higher the power efficiency), at the cost of requiring a slightly better cooling system. This lack of variety is probably due to constrained supply due to low yields on AMD's 32nm process. This is sort of like the situation with the AMD E-350 processors, where they would be absolutely incredible low-cost netbook processors (and the platform cost makes this quite possible), but they can sell every machine they make at the $500 price because of how compellingly better they are than Atoms, so there's no reason to make any that are a better value.

I don't get the benefit of newegg as I don't live in the US.

It's not a fair comparison but it's what's available in the shop. There weren't any A6s there which depending on the price may have been enough to convince me, but it was only A4 or A8.

My decision making process was also balancing power consumption, quality of the laptop case, etc. The A4 had a crappy laptop case to top it off. If they are having yield issues with llano then this goes some way to explain why there aren't more options available. It's difficult to compete like the e350 if you can't deliver the cpus.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

Alereon posted:

My main point was just that the store you went to had lovely selection and pricing, its not really anything to do with the product or how it stacks up in the market.

I decided to check on pricespy.co.nz to see how prices stack up across the country. The pricing is consistent and of the few llano laptops available the A4 is always priced around the range of an i3-2310M.

Perhaps it would be better to say that my country has lovely selection and pricing.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

Alereon posted:

Significantly, yes. Is it possible to disable the graphics card in your laptop?

Check the catalyst control centre for support. The NVidia drivers running on my laptop allow specifying the graphic conditions for using the intel or amd gpus. If not then there should be a default gpu option.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe
The performance in ARMA 2 pretty well sums up bulldozer's capabilities.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe
I was looking at the BD cores from a commercial perspective recently. I could easily see the cores working well for niche supercomputer applications or specifically optimised code. I gather that market is priced based on actual performance rather than marketing.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe
Most failed companies diversify into other areas when they aren't profitable at their core businesses. They should be focusing on making ati profitable first. Then look at getting more profit out of the CPU business. At least they have admitted they are really competing with intel anymore.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

Alereon posted:

Again, AMD isn't diversifying or launching any new products, they're just licensing their brand name to companies already making memory. They get cash money for literally zero work.

Seriously I hope this is what they mange to do. Gut feeling we may be discussing in a year how they managed to lose money.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

The French Army! posted:

What does this mean for the existing stocks of Phenom II chips? I've got an Athlon II X2 240 right now and I'd like to make that an X4 640 because my motherboard is still good for a new CPU. Will they be gone soon or do I have some time?

You will still have a bit of time. I've got a motherboard that I might upgrade the cpu on price dependent. Though I might put an X6 in it as the cpu utilisation is on the high side.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe
If they're running like most corporations they've probably fired all the engineers and replaced them with a marketing team. I can see a marketing team claiming that a 2 billion transistor cpu only has 1.2 billion if it changes perception.

We'll get a better idea of what they've done in the next year.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe
One thing I've noticed is that if you don't have a gpu there are heaps of games that will not run at all. Games that would otherwise run alright on even a 540M.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

FISHMANPET posted:

Oh poo poo, did not realize the i3 had hyperthreading. That kind of changes the whole game.

My i3 laptop has comparable or better performance for cpu intensive tasks than my athlon X4 3GHz. The exception is when I'm rendering video files. That's where the four cores, rather than two hyperthreaded cores, do a significantly better job.

I tend to agree that for gaming an i3 would be better unless you are an edge case where you need a lot of cpus.

  • Locked thread