Details on AMD Bulldozer: Opterons to Feature Configurable TDP
by Johan De Gelas & Kristian Vättö on July 15, 2011 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- CPUs
- Bulldozer
- AMD
- Cloud Computing
- Zambezi
- Valencia
- Interlagos
Final Thoughts
In the last few years, AMD hasn't really been able to fight against Intel in the high-end CPU market. Pretty much since the release of the Nehalem microarchitecture in late 2008, Intel has held the crown of fastest CPUs and AMD has only been the best option for budget builds. Bulldozer has suffered from delays and recently AMD delayed it even more because the performance didn't meet their expectations. However, Bulldozer could have the potential to shake Intel's position in other than the budget CPU market.
According to leaked product positioning slides, Zambezi is aimed to fight against Intel's Core i5 and i7 lineups. Zambezi will feature up to eight cores, which is twice as many as i7-2600(K)'s four cores. AMD said that they won't join the Hyper-Threading club and they will deliver as many physical cores as Intel delivers physical and virtual cores combined. It looks like AMD is keeping their word, though they're only delivering half as many "FP/SSE cores". Intel will probably still provide the best single-threaded performance but AMDs aggressive approach with many physcial cores may bring them the trophy of best multi-threaded performance. We shall hopefully see this very soon.
In the server market, AMD's role is a lot more complex. For some HPC applications, AMD offers the best performance at a much lower price. In the midrange, AMD based servers offer more cores (quad-socket) and (in most cases) higher performance for a relatively small price premium over the typical dual-socket Xeon servers. At the same time, if your applications cannot make good use of all those cores, dual-socket Xeon servers can offer a better performance/watt ratio and lower response times. In the high end, Intel Xeon E7 completely dominates, and AMD has left this market for now. In the low power market, Intel's low power Xeons offer a better performance/watt and AMD can only compete when every dollar counts. In most cases, the price of the server CPU is less important in the grand TCO scheme.
In other words, AMD really needs a server CPU with a much higher performance per core and a better performance/watt ratio. TDP Power Cap or configurable TDP helps AMD's server CPUs keep the electricity bill down by avoiding "bursty" power usage. At the same time, with their implementation, TDP Power Cap should have little effect on the real world (not pure throughput benchmarking) performance if you do not lower the TDP too much. We won't be sure until we have measured it, but it looks like a big step in the right direction: lower TCO and more predictable power usage without a (large) performance penalty.
AMD's Future Plans
| Second Generation AMD Fusion lineup | |||||
| Codename | Krishna and Wichita | Trinity | Komodo | Sepang | Terramar |
| Architecture | Enhanced Bobcat | NG Bulldozer | NG Bulldozer | NG Bulldozer | NG Bulldozer |
| SOI | 28nm | 32nm | 32nm | 32nm | 32nm |
| Core count | 1-4 | 2-4 | 6-10 | Up to 10 | Up to 20 |
| DX11 IGP | Yes | Yes | No | No | No |
| Socket | N/A | N/A | N/A | C2012 | G2012 |
Bulldozer will make its way to mainstream CPUs in 2012. Llano's successor, Trinity, will feature up to four next-generation Bulldozer cores. Next-generation (NG) in this context appears to mean that AMD will tweak the architecture because the CPUs will still be manufactured using 32nm SOI. Zambezi's successor, Komodo, will again increase the core count and make it up to 10.
As for the server market, AMD's approach will be a bit more aggressive. AMD will again increase the amount of cores to up to 20 NG Bulldozer cores. Valencia's successor will be 10-core Sepang and Interlagos' will be 20-core Terramar. The server CPUs will also feature PCIe 3.0 support.
Krishna and Wichita will also replace AMD's current Ontario and Zacate APUs. There will be a die shrink from 40nm to 28nm so at this point, Krishna and Wichita look the most interesting from the 2nd gen Fusion lineup. Doubling the cores should yield a nice performance boost in heavily threaded scendarios, though single-threaded performance is still a sore spot for Bobcat compared to other architectures.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
59 Comments
View All Comments
SanX - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
Nice job with the tests. They show exactly what i say AMD FP is twice faster then Intel.I used Lahey 32bit code, and as you can see our results are completely consistent - mine with E8400 at 3.8GHz and yours QX6700 at 3.2GHz
And they are consistent in 64bits: with gfortran_64 i have a bit faster execution on my Intel then on 32bit Lahey and the result is around the same as yours on your i7 3.6GHz
1 4.01s
2 2.04s
Will add here AMD 64bit result as soon as kick kids from the games but as we see we can not expect much different conclusion: on stock clocks AMD FP is twice faster then Intel.
45nm AMD Phenom is by the way is easily overclockable by 25-45% or 3.5-4.1 GHz. When overclocked to the same clocks as Intel, AMD is even more then twice faster.
BSMonitor - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
Completely talking out of one's arse.........BSMonitor - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
Idk, after years of AMD cpu domination, Intel was more than happy to let everyone talk about Conroe, benchmark it to the public. So much so that it drove up prices of the things when they finally were released.The reverse is true now, and I just don't see the same enthusiasm from AMD on Bulldozer. Maybe these 8-cores will be on par with 2600K ?? But Intel is still holding onto 6-core Sandy Bridge.
Me thinks AMD has another Phenom on its hands. Big, low clock speeds, weaker than expected performance. Eventually, AMD is going to have to improve the performance of it's cores, not just keep adding more crappy ones.
saneblane - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
i think it's quite clear to everyone that amd went on a whole new level with this design, soo much so that it is even hard to understand how much core the processor actually has. like JF amd said people buy processors not "cores". so if bulldozer die size is smaller than a sandy bridge and use less or equal transistors then amd made the better processor. what we have to look at now is not cores anymore amd could have split 1 large core into 3 instead of 2 and we would be hearing the same arguments, about 3 core vs a single core. what we need to watch is how both companies used the real estate of the die, and who used less and accomplish more made the better cpu.and i fully expect an intel processor to copy bullldozer in the near future. cross licensing sucks
erikejw - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
Cliff notes:1. Don't run the Intel 320 SSD in any machines that needs perfect reliability or any kind of mission critical software.
2. Back up all data on current drives immediately.
I post it here so maybe some Anandtech guy can address the issue since they seem to be unaware of this for some months reported issue.
Concearning reliability of the the Intel SSD 320 (and perhaps the 510 too).
Huge number of complete data losses for users.
Intel finally admits the problem exists.
Power failure, instant shut downs causes the issue.
No reliable information about if it is a firmware issue, design problem(bad design), hardware problem(controller etc, at least running this spec).
A simple firmware update is most likely to solve the issue eventually
Erik
-------------------
-------------------
"“Be wary of the new Intel SSD 320 series. Currently, there's a bug in the controller that can cause the device to revert to 8MB during a power failure. AFAIK they have not yet publicly announced it, and won't have a firmware fix ready for release until the end of July.”"
---------------------
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=11858...
--------------------
http://www.fudzilla.com/memory/item/23447-intel-co...
etc
BSMonitor - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
What does this have to do with AMD Bulldozer?Toadster - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
search for "Intel Intelligent Power Node Manager"MilwaukeeMike - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
It's what TDP stands for, and I don't think it's in the article. (it's the amount of heat, measured in watts, that must be dissipated by the heatsink to keep the CPU operating safely). I had to stop reading on page two and leave AT.com to go find the answer. Please explain your acronyms... it's really annoying to read about something and feel too dumb for the article. , and it's never a good idea to give readers a reason to leave your website. :)GaMEChld - Saturday, July 16, 2011 - link
The joy of tabbed browsing.ajlueke - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
The sad part about the reality we currently face is there really hasn't been a large increase in CPU performance since the Nethalem launch nearly three years ago.AMDs release of the Phenom II line kept them in it, as they were able to offer lesser performance, but at far less cost. SandyBridge changed all that. While again, it doesn't really perform that much better than the high end Nethalem's launched three years ago, or that much worse than the 990x, it is far cheaper than those $999 price tags. SandyBridge by performing as good as the old high end chips and being priced much lower really eroded any reason at all to buy/build an AMD based system at the enthusiast level.
Bulldozer, with a street price reported to be around $300 needs to be faster than SandyBridge and needs to launch sooner in Q3, rather than in Q4 (October). If it is only on parity, then the reality would be that AMD was finally able to develop a chip that matches the performance Intel had three years ago. With Ivy Bridge, the successor to the high end throne, set to ascend in Q1 2012 would it then take AMD another three years to match that performance? Seems as though they are falling further and further behind. But, this is all speculation. I suppose we'll see what tomorrow brings.