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Slimebeast on 28 August 2010
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Soleron said:
Slimebeast said:

Well that sucks. 15% faster than a Core i7 per-clock.

AMD has nothing on that, because from what I've learned the Bulldozer will only be on par with Core i7 clock-for-clock, and will probably struggle to get the same high clock speeds of Sandy Bridge. Also, the Bulldozer is coming out 6 months later than Sandy Bridge.

We don't know anything about the performance of Bulldozer except that the 16-core Interlagos will be 50% faster than the current 12-core Magny-Cours. That tells us almost nothing about single-threaded performance or low-thread (desktop) performance. However on the server Intel doesn't have a Sandy Bridge part until mid-year (8 cores) and the top SKU will be Westmere-EX (10 cores) throughout 2011, not SB. So Bulldozer will match that.

Bulldozer will be out around the same time as the 6- and 8-core SB desktop parts, mid-year to Q3. What's up against these parts is Llano, about March, which will obviously lose on the CPU front but graphics performance will be much better.

Bulldozer, on paper, looks as advanced as SB in many areas and makes up a lot of ground on prefetching, branch prediction and power consumption. It is also a high-frequency design; clockspeeds will be ahead of Sandy Bridge if the design translates to reality. Especially on mobile parts - expect Llano to outclock SB by a great deal in the same thermals.

And they should make some marketshare gains Q1 and Q2 with Llano/Bobcat despite SB because Bobcat will destroy Atom on netbooks and AMD's mobile share is so low that Llano has to improve its standing no matter what happens.

 

tl;dr: The SB parts reviewed here aren't up against BD - they're against Llano. BD's fight is with the much laterlaunching 6/8 core SBs. BD will do great on the ultra-high-end servers because Intel won't have SB parts there until 2012.

I was just going by that Anandtech preview, "In many ways the architecture [Bulldozer] looks to be on-par with what Intel has done with Nehalem/Westmere.".

This module design with 2 fake cores (or whatever it is), advanced branch prediction and stuff, it sounds like a typical AMD "hit or miss" architectural design gamble. I don't wanna get disappointed again like with Phenom so I'm gonna predict it's gonna be "miss" lol.

But I am glad you are optimistic! There is hope.