So they're going to build.. First they Bulldoze the place Then they bring in the Piledriver laying the postings Then the Steamroller for the building surroundings Next comes Excavator ! to destroy all the former work Great plan amd...
It looks really promising, indeed. Lot's of fine tuning there, actually more than just "fine". And they don't need to beat Intel for top performance anyway, just keep up the pressure and give us good mainstream chips with solid single thread performance!
That's what they get beat on all the time, single thread performance - oh and multi thread for that matter. They've been getting creamed on single thread, specifically. Your exclamation point sure points to a fine fantasy never happening future though given the failure that the present is. Must take a lot of fanboyism and some strong prozac in the water.
Less and less applications are single-threaded, it's a dying part of the market. AMD is every bit as goodas Intel and better in its price class. Most apps perform betteron FX-8350 than I5 3570k. The FPS are up there with 3770k on many new games. This will only get better over the next year as more and more games offer 8 core processor support. There is absolutely no compelling reason to go Intel for cpu's under $300. With Steamroller the ascension of AMD to a BETTER alternative to Intel will only accelerate. All the initial bad reviews which were based on erroneous testing procedures and old benchmarks are proving to be ancient history and poor analysis
Just like Phenom II was what Phenom should've been, but by then it was too late. AMD is always a generation behind. In the notebook market this isn't much of a problem, Intel's even further behind there, but in the mid-end desktop chips it shows. Which is a shame, because mid-end Intel is way too expensive.
Although I still insist that this Bulldozer/steamroller/whatever architecture will have its 15 months of fame when games start running on octocores.
Pretty much what you said at the start there. God knows I miss AMD being competitive in the CPU market, but in anything but a "value" sense I don't see them bringing that game for another 2/3 years, if ever.
If you think that AMD has "always been a generation behind" then you're seriously mistaken. The AMD Athlon 64 series STOMPED the living HELL out of the Pentium 4 series processors and cost less. AMD WAS good at single threaded applications, but they started focusing on the growth abilities of the 64 bit architecture, and lost track of what would in the end be most important. You can't fault a company for looking to the future, and attempting to expand their horizons. Had software developers thought more about the future of hardware instead of the present limitations then things would have gone in AMD's favor CONSIDERABLY.
Intel has good processors, we'll give them that. But where they have ALWAYS lacked is price-performance ratio. They don't scale, overclock, cool, or deal with heat as well, and up until the I5 series they BARELY managed to give two shits about power consumption. Yes, Intel is better for RAW performance, but quite frankly, how many average gamers are going to be able ot afford a 2 thousand dollar processor just to play their favorite game in six years? NONE How many enthusiasts...plenty. AMD serves a greater portion of the population, and they know it. They just got freaking lazy, and it started to show. They have a chance to pick it back up, and it's up to them to admit they slipped up, but don't get fooled. Even IF AMD slips, they'll still have budget minded consumers worried about price to performance ratios, and will ALWAYS have customers as long as they're in business solely because of the economic standstill the world is in.
Any idea of when could the first legitimate benchmark start to surface? The lack of competition in the CPU market is not healthy for users, that's for sure. I'd love to see AMD back in the game in other areas, in addition to Netbooks (with Brazos) and Value (Llano offers pretty good bang for the bucks).
I fail to see how it's been negative to users? Have you seen the cost to performance ratio of Intel's Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge chips?? I mean, seriously! When the Core i5 2500k came out, UN-overclocked, it was able to go toe-to-toe with the $1,000 Intel Core Extreme from the generation before! All this from a chip that runs $220?? That's insane value!
The value is only furthered when you take into account its low thermal output, and it's high overhead for over clocking. I have mine OC'd to 4.1GHz, and that's not even beginning to stretch it. I've seen them OC'd to 4.5GHz regularly on air cooling. This isn't "hard" or "the exception to the rule"; it is the norm for these chips. And that's just Sandy Bridge! Ivy Bridge offers a 10-15% improvement right out of the box!
Hell, the Core i3 2100, running *only* $120, despite being just a dual-core chip, is able to easily wipe the floor with even AMD's octo-core Bulldozer and Piledriver chips, in just about every gaming and synthetic benchmark, despite that chip costing nearly twice as much! It powers my brother's gaming PC, and he's able to run Battlefield 3 on Ultra at 1600x900 (his monitor's resolution) with 50+FPS! Thanks to all this "non competitive consumer screwing" you're preaching about, I was able to build his entire rig, sans monitor, for $469 shipped! I mean, you couldn't ask for a better time to buy new PC gear!
"Battlefield 3 on Ultra at 1600x900 (his monitor's resolution) with 50+FPS!" " for $469 shipped!" Yeah right. Maybe if there was a 75% off sale on video cards where you bought it. BF3 on ultra requires at least a $500 video card, regardless of how much you cheap out on a current cpu. Hell, if you came into my shop with a budget of $469 shipped, i have 7 employees that will laugh at you and kindly hand you a business card from Best Buy with two letters on the back....HP. that said, the best bang for the bug gaming cpu is the AMD FX4100 for about $140. Why go weak i3 dual core when you can go mid range quad from AMD for $20 more. I like your fairy tale, almost as much as I like some of the ones in the bible.
If you want it running on Ultra in the middle of a firefight at min. 60fps, you bet! Considering our customers are buying 21.5" LCD's with resolutions of 1980x1050 as a minimum. Even our customers would laugh at the claim of BF3 on Ultra for $469. Sorry guys, i'm no AMD "fanboy", but around here we call a spade a spade. This dudes claim is fantasy based on a bath salts hallucination.
Your customers are buying 1980x1050 resolution monitors but he explicitly stated his brother is running on a 1600x900 Also he said 50FPS+ not 60FPS steady like you are claiming.
I would like to personally see that running in Ultra at 50fps, even on a 1600x900. If i can sell BF3 Ultra desktops for under $500, i'm going to open a few more stores and put Best Buys computer department out of business lol
Wait, I'm confused, who was lying about what? I'm not sure what that toms hardware link was supposed to prove, since both of those guys were talking about BF3 on Ultra settings, and Ultra was not tested on that page you linked. Better dial back the blind AMD hatred, since you were attacking people who were arguing about FPS and price, not Intel and AMD.
Mr dupemeister got the rez wrong, the framerate wrong, then the his cpu recommendation wrong, then he couldn't comprehend when he went to the link, as it clearly shows his crap cpu pick losing to the cheaper Intel chip, after he claimed his crap amd pick was the best bang and 20 bucks more. LOL But you ragging amd fans who cannot stand an insult expect us all to stand your constantly insulting lies them smile pretty and thank you for your stupid treachery and lies. Right ? Okay, thank you so much for having the midol disability that prevents you from being able to think clearly or get anything correct.
You're both blind, mind numbed, idiot doofy bats. Here is his quote idiot #2
" that said, the best bang for the bug gaming cpu is the AMD FX4100 for about $140. Why go weak i3 dual core when you can go mid range quad from AMD for $20 more."
All that counter-offensive for nothing... He never said he runs it on ULTRA. Boy people nowadays thinks you have to play the games on ultra or else you're just not playing it at all. A radeon 6870 or a 550 ti runs the game at that resolution on high details and it's BEAUTIFUL with over 50 fps...
Well actually he said ultra but there must be some options not enabled like msaa, I beleive it'S totally possible to get that on a 140$ card. I built myself a pc for one of my friend that total with the case did cost me around 350$ total, without hard drive and power supply and that totally runs Battlefield 3 easily on 1600*900 not ultra but almost.
Unfortunately 60 fps and full hd are the standard these days, so picking custom fps targets and lower resolutions doesn't really count as far as im concerned
at the very least we are suggesting Radeon 7870 or GTX570. How much are those where you come from? Up here, there is no way i can build you a computer for $469 that we will put our name on and certify it for BF3 at Ultra!
I built a PC for my younger brother with $250 of parts from Microcenter, and gave him two HD 5770s bought on Ebay for ~$110 for both. Bought an HDD from Newegg for $70. He only plays at 1440x900 though.
Not trying to stir the pot, but I get around 60 FPS consistently on BF3 with ALL settings on Ultra. Everything, including having ambient occlusion turned on.
I have a overclocked XFX Radeon HD 6950, which is not a $500 card.
I have a i7 3770, and 16GB of 1600MHz RAM, and the game and all maps are loading from an Intel 520 160GB SSD.
Believe it or not but its the truth. I just finished a game on Back to Karkand map, and I averaged 50-60 FPS, with spikes going well over 60.
Overall.. the FX4100 is a better chip in a multi purpose computer. (in my opinion) Normally you will get a better Motherboard (more feature rich) then what you'd get from paying for the Intel boards as well.. so it's all a factor. As to these $469 dream machine.. well hell..
A standard gaming rig that I'd be comfortable building (without an OS and at cost) will run .. $574.00 - FX 4100 - 8 G PC 1280 - Gigabyte 970A -D3 - Radeon 7770 1G - 1 TB Western Digitial Blue - LG DVDRW - Antec One Casing - Corsair Builder 500W
Now going intel you could get an I3 and a H61 at a similiar price.. or you could go for a comparable MB to the Amd one for aprox $10 more over this system.
To get it down into the $400 range I'd have to hmmm.. No video look for a $30 PSU and a $25 Case (save $50..) that would get it around the $450 range.. Drop down to 4G of ram would bring it into the 430.. (get where im going with this?)
That was thru price match here in Canada btw.. I know you can still get some things cheaper down south via combo's and such.. but putting together a half ways competent gaming machine with new computer parts.. in the $450 range.. Good luck with that. Unless you got some killer sale on it's not going to happen.. and forget about the rebates as we all know how those work out 75% of the time. At the end of the day you'd seriously have to compromize with your hardware selection just to get it into such a budget.
It's cool dude, the people here who aren't mentally defective already know that what you're saying is broadly accurate, pissing matches over AMD/Intel aside. There's not much sense demonstrating it to the rest... :/
3 fps more in one benchmark out of 8 and the other 7 are equal, quite a nice stomping of a core i3 vs a fx 4100. Oh and the core i3 can't be overclocked... what an amazing stomping.
It can be overclocked, and dumb dumb, the op liar said $20 more for your amd loser.
So in this case, the amd fanboys blow their freaking brains out through their backsides again, they actually LOSE, and pay $20 more.
Thanks, I'll keep that in mind when you idiots all collude in the GPU reviews, and pull the EXACT OPPOSITE in clan idiot mode and fail to notice how stupid you all are even after it is explicitly pointed out, and "coming to grips" "with reality" and admitting you supported the big fat lie, of course will never occur.
That's the fruitcake liar amd fan. Of course anyone else who takes exception to it, they are in the wrong...
The amd fanboy mind is a terribly wasted thing, throw it out.
You couldn't really be a more transparent shill. Nobody mentioned "non competitive consumer screwing" here, yet you post an essay countering said imaginary comments backed up by some hand-waving and supposition which is disproven by easily-obtained facts. You started a whole argument though, so gz on that.
15% IPC improvement right out of the box? keep dreaming, Ivy max performance boost is 5% on "some" benches and 1 to 3% on most benches and seeing how it cant OC as much as SandyB I say AMD will catch up with Intel sooner than most of you thought
keeping in mind that AMD plans to encrease IPC by 15% on each of their updated Modules, PileDriver is already doing just that(15% IPC performance boost clock per clock against BD) and that Piledriver module was lacking the L3 cache the BD Module had and still was pulling the 15% performance boost
SB can Oc much higher than Ivy, so thats a moot point, whats a 1-5% IPC gain when SB can OC 10% higher than Ivy? I suspect Haswell will not OC as high as the best SB could
So.... PS4 and Xbox One are both releasing with 8 core AMD cpus, "Never" is looking pretty damn close on that horizon, eh bud? Intel fanboys like you are about to be throwing more money away to try and keep up. Be sure to put that Haswell, you'll inevitably get, under water and fill the res with your sweet, sweet fanboy tears.
Extreme editions are priced that high because they are the bleeding edge that pave the way for the next generation of chips. Funding for continued research on producing a high production chip of its kind.
Wrong again rarson. Demand for any item can be very high, and drive the lacking supply price higher and higher. In this case they are priced high because there is sufficient demand to sustain that top tier price. If the demand was low, the price would drop, YOU AMD FANBOY brainfarter.
( do you feel better your self installed idiot version of economics "proved" to you internally that demand for the big top Intel chip is very low ?) LOL - so sad.....the emotions of a fanboy farting out uncontrollably, econ dumb oh one we'll call it.
I'm beginning to understand why you amd freaks have twisted penny pinching frustrated price obsessions, you haven't a clue about the very basics, but your mind is very willing to arrogantly and in error, attempt to "correct others" with amd fanboyism as the leading call in the emotionally fulfilling statements you offer.
It is like a crazy girl having her period and blurting out her out of control emotions. LOL No wonder I told giraradou or whatever miss sensitive's name is to take the midol.
Thanks.. With STM licensing FDSOI 28nm to GF , which AMD can use for a path towards atleast improving Vishera series with a die-shrink it makes little sense for AMD to move to TSMC now. Easier would it be for AMD to chose from the multiple IBM bulk consortium members for fabbing rather than TSMC which is all by itself and go to for any 28nm manufacturing today.
"Load operations (two operands) are also compressed so that they only take a single entry in the physical register file, which helps increase the effective SIDE of each RF."
It still only has a single FPU unit (and no matter how you divde up the 128-bits); in the real-world, it probably means that it'll only use half of it at any given time.
So, it's still gonna suck.
Don't forget that computers are really just really BIG, glorified calculators. And without the FPU; it won't be able to do much of what it's intended/designed to do in the first place.
For FPU related work maybe. AMD's stated before their vision is to move FPU work off onto the GPU side of things. If their plans are still in place the FPU is just a place holder for the time being.
I am not saying it's the right choice but it's what they have said they wanted to do.
At any rate a fast integer processing rate already goes a long way towards making a computer feel fast for most users. And for a lot of server tasks it would be good enough.
You are correct. With only a single FPU unit, it will only be in use half the time. We have 40,000+ AMD Interlagos cores, yet tell our users to run on only half of them to get better performance. We have 32 cores per node, yet if a user runs on all 32, their HPC codes run slower. By running on 16 cores, thus wasting the other 16 cores, their HPC codes run faster. This is not true for every single code, but it is true for many of them.
It really doesn't matter to most folks if Steamroller is as good or better than Haswell. The real question is does Steamroller continue to up performance and meet the needs of Mainstream consumers. That is where money is made, not in the 5% of the market that buys over-hyped, over-priced, top-of-the-line CPUs (or GPUs). If Steamroller continues AMD's 15% performance bumps it will be a sales hit just as Trinity is and Vishera will be.
Most people don't care what brand of CPU/APU or GPU is in their PC. All they care is that the PC functions as desired and the price is affordable. I'm confident that AMD will continue to serve their needs quite well.
BTW, the fallacy that moving from one process to a lower sized process is still a big deal, i.e. 32nm to 22nm, it untrue. It has power consumption advantages for ULV but for everything else, other design parameters are far more important than the process node these days, as Intel learned with tri-gate Ivy Bridge which has leakage and OC'ing issues.
In regards to benches, people might as well get use to the Intel bias and make their purchasing decisions based on actual system performance because Intel is good at buying favor on benches.
You sound like the people who said 1 GHz is enough for everybody...
The reality is that the mainstream market follows in the footsteps of the enthusiast market. So sooner or later everybody is affected by the directions AMD and Intel are taking today. And these are quite exciting times. AMD is betting the farm on heterogeneous computing with HSA, while Intel is revolutionizing homogeneous high throughput computing with AVX2 and TSX. It's really the equivalent of the 'RISC versus CISC' debate of this decade. Perhaps 99.9% of the world's population doesn't care about these things at all, and you're free to join them, but it's what brought you eBay and The Sims at an affordable price!
Computers have evolved from mere tools, to becoming part of our lives. In the future we'll probably interact even closer with them, for instance through speech and natural gestures. This requires lots of additional innovation.
Nope, but almost. The circle dance had been Intel/MicroSoft: Intel needed windoze bloat to justify the performance ramp, and MicroSoft needed Intel to ramp to support dreadful windoze.
Multi-processor/core and parallelism is going to be some hurdle for Amdahl constrained single threaded apps. Which is most of them, in the consumer PC world.
Computers have evolved from being computers to being entertainment appliances. That Jobs for that.
I look at it slightly different. AMD is totally dependent right now on its OEM partners to push its processors into products that the consumers/market wants.
Let us take Trinity for example. A excellent mobile APU and improvement over Llano in every single way. With AMD giving OEMs all the freedom to differentiate compared to the strict Ultabook guidelines that Intel forces, you should see a huge number of Ultra Thins (UT)
But what the OEMs are doing is equipping Trinity based NB/UT with substandard hardware. Worse they are pricing them so friggin close to low-end ultrabooks or UB like a little thicker notebooks with a better performance to hit AMD at all ends.
So now we have Brazos 2 systems fighting the simple Ivy pentiums which is not its intended competition and Trinity systems against Ivy systems sometimes with a discrete basic NVIDIA chip which can come close/exceed Trinity's graphics performance with a more powerful and efficient CPU.
So AMD who can just compete in Price/price to performance market right now have a) Intel based systems very close in price in consumer market. b) High-end gaming is now solely Intel c) Stable (repeatedly rewarding) business market firm on the Intel camp. d) Intel firmly owning the low-power market (expensive) due to technology advantage.
That is the reason AMD is missing revenues while Intel is growing albeit at a slower pace.
Totally agree that there are many computer uses where CPU speed and architecture does nto matter that much.
Unfortunately, the laptop OEMs have nto yet caught on to this. They still produce only crappy systems with crappy screens and crappy keyboards/mousepads (and in extension flexing cases). Or they go ultra light/thin and add unnecessary GPU and top of the line quad core CPUs
I think AMD needs to play its cards for affordable systems not just for cheap systems, but for an affordable middle ground, where the UX is quality and the chips are just good enough for the non gamer. AMD could do a lot with a good branding. Where is the AMD equivalent of UltraBooks with standards for solid keyboards, high res/high quality (IPS) screens, etc. At the end a CPU with a decent GPU (good enough for photo/video viewing and the OS animation gimmicks) shines much more in a solid combination. Call them EverydayBooks or A-Class laptops (as in AMD class)
Whom is going to build these amd wonders I ask. AMD couldn't get their damned fan design correct on the 69xx series and had to SHAVE PLASTIC CORNERS on the 6 pin connector. I shudder to think AMD would have a hand in the design... they can't do basic measuring correct - and go to production with that kind of fault. I suspect AMD internally is a bunch of scared losers who dare not speak out about problems lest they "get canned for the sake of the bottom line". That grows into a real problem very quickly - different parts of the company not communicating with other portions - STOVEPIPED management with workers, engineers, groups, blocks, all living in fear... SOMEONE needs to straighten it out - a modern government, secret agency, AND corporation cannot function properly if secrecy due to fear or stovepiping or "security" and/or protecting one's domain is the REASON for the silence and lack of communication... In that environment people "give up" pretty quickly and "work with what they've got" which is less than they need to get it done correctly. It's like AMD drivers - " I didn't know anything was wrong " says Catalyst Maker.... that kind of level of total and utter lack of communication.
You speak like everyhting is so simple working building video cards and processors. It's so easy that everyone at home should build their own freaking parts, it's so easy... But still you ahve so much knowledge about management but you spend your timje spreading hate on forums about AMD AMD AMD....
''I suspect AMD internally is a bunch of scared losers''
You jsut suspect too much things, go back to your design of the processor and video card that will dominate them all, it seems so easy after all.
Oh must have really severed that nerve as the reality cut through to the bone. You're fired ! (so another amd employee left - of course the emp was told it's layoffs again, but we all know crap under performance leads to it, and is effectively a firing no matter the name, or the nature, as in the boss saying "turn in your resignation") Aren't you touchy feely types all about minimizing the hostile work environment ... You ever been onboard a sinking ship miss touchy ?
While I agree with your comment about 'good enough' performance for mainstream users, I don't agree with the idea that process node shrinks are not important.
Most of the consumer market uses their pcs simply for we browsing, email, and video. There has been an enormous shift from desktop to notebook and now to tablet and other mobile and light devices. This shift is enabled by process node shrinks that reduce power consumption and heat to reasonable levels and allow greater performance in smaller form factors. I think core 2 duo was 'good enough' to meet basic needs without feeling sluggish. But what user could complain about an extra hour of battery life?
If you read AT regularly, you'll see the impact that node shrinks have on battery life, power consumption, and heat/noise. Ivy bridge is no different and neither is any
I doubt it was AMD's master plan to give up the juicy profit margins in high performance and enterprise applications. I'm guessing that AMD would kill to have the revenue that Intel is pulling in from those small number of processors. AMD just can't compete hence the need to fall back to the low margin value business.
I had several friends predict the crap that bulldozer is long before it arrived simply by perusing leaks of the achitecture. If my less than certified yet sentient friends can read the writing on the wall concerning the architecture choices long before they actually arrive...what the heck is wrong with amd's design teams ? "Can't compete" is usually a phrase I toss out for it's overtly exaggerated usage, but in this case I make an exception. Somehow amd found some light in the GPU arena concerning the same thing, then their drivers fall flat on their face far too often, ruining the core work. I certainly hope their new hires can straighten out the mess, but hope for change has not been a well placed bet of late.
What forum do you think you're on? Yes, if you want to debate the likely impact to AMD's volume sales, overall adoption of this family of chips, etc. there are many factors that are lot more significant than what its peak performance is like (even though you left most of those out, and hint, individual consumer preference has a lot less to do with it than it should.)
But this is not motleyfool or another stock discussion site, nor one that really is much interested with "mainstream consumers" in general. This is a site for hardware enthusiasts, and the big question most of us are going to have is, a) is this a chip we might be interested in having in one of our systems, and b) what technologies does it bring to the table that might be interesting as far as overall technical evolution of computing?
In short, the article is correct, the big question for this forum and this audience is how will it stack up against Haswell.
Most people have always bought low end hardware so not much has changed. There are some more options now in tablets but those aren't really a replacement for a notebook/desktop because they have many constraints. My impression is they are used alongside normal computers.
Yes, and PC sales are rising - with the population. There is a point though, as overall percentage is of course, and has been, of course, not rising, as more gadgets tending toward mobile use are developed, and that has been occurring for some time now. Unless the world population becomes completely nomadic 24/7/365, PC's are not going away.
The Desktop isn't going anywhere, neither is it shrinking, the sales rate is merely slowing down as everyone has one. Netbooks hit the same wall a couple years ago, tablets and phones will hit the wall in due time. The Netbook didn't kill off the laptop, the laptop didn't kill off the desktop, they all compliment each other. We have been in a post-pc world since early 2000 and in that time the sales of PC's have tripled.
I'd like you to see bid frequently (daily or more) and successfully on eBay items on a Nexus 7.
Not to mention the crowd of people that actually sell something on eBay. have fun uploading multiple pictures and typing longer descriptions on an eBay item on a tablet.
Let me know when AMD releases a new CPU that is at least 100% faster than their last CPU. Cause that's the only time I'll consider them even being an option again. Honestly AMD, add SMT. The performance gain/watt is amazing. You can still have more cores, but have SMT too.
Not by a long shot. All we can expect this steaming pile of shitty engineering is to be competitive with nehalem. Still worse ST performance but better MT performance. There's only so much you can do with polishing a turd.
But what if it becomes a petrified turd from being around so long and getting buried all the time ? Then it seems it could be a really hard, polished up.... legendary find ?
AMD as a whole, needs to streamline their entire consumer line. The Steamroller sounds good in everyway - but we need to see it. By the time it comes out, I'll be chugging along with my intel i5 CPU... my Core2Quad is actually holding up pretty damn good.
Much of my AMD friends and clients have gone intel already. But, I have no problems building an AMD system as long as it provides good performance for the price... which is something the FX DID not come close to doing. There is simply NO way I can recommend any FX CPU to anyone... The A-series for low-end is fine. Windows8 is another thing to mess things up, hopefully Windows7 will be available for us IT /small tech people to continue building and selling systems.
The problems (I see) with the AMD mess, which should hopefully be cleared up by 2013. Currently, AMD has 3 different sockets on the market. Its confusing as to what chip goes with which chipset etc etc. Socket A+ needs to die. The CPUs need to be like Core i-series, ALL of them have a GPU built in -THAT can be used as a co-processor if not used for graphics at any time. It simplify the SKUs.
Socket FM1 is dead... Socket FM2 is currently shipping only from OEMs (HP, etc). But the bone-head thing is that FM2 is not at all compatible with FM1 - yet current FM2 motherboards use the EXACT same AMD north bridge! WTF?! FM2 doesn't support PCIe 3.0 And according to the LAST AMD roadmap I've seen, AMD won't have a PCIe 3.0 chipset until 2014? Hey, doesn't AMD sell PCIe 3.0 video cards? Yep... and you can't use them on an AMD powered computer... how stupid. FM1/2 chipset are more advanced than AM3 as they have native USB 3.0 support.
AMD needs to get their butt into gear. There should only be FM2, a NEW chipset in 2013 with PCIe 3.0 support. The new Steamroller CPUs should have a whole new brand name and model number. "FX" has been poisoned. AMD ruined the name of FX from the past.
How about Athlon III X4-3400 (quad core @ 3.4Ghz)?
I hope AMD does well... I'm not counting on it... but they may not be as stupid as Microsoft.
You can run a 3.0 card on a 2.0 lane just fine. Dunno what you are talking about. And you can't even saturare a 2.0 x16 with a top end card, so what's the big deal?
Read the footnote on the slide. The amount of hardware went up by 100%; the 25% number is the actual average throughput gain AMD saw in their testing. IOW ~25% of the time Bulldozer/Piledriver's shared decode maxed out in cases where a wider decode could have done more instructions at the same time.
Well its not a great processor, but it does sound like AMD is putting some thought into it.
They really need to hyper-evolve this Bulldozer junk and get something that is competitive out.
I'm still rolling along with my Phenom II 6 core, and it ain't bad really, even in basic gaming like League of Legends. But I imagine I'd be better off going Intel on my next rig. I'll still take a look at Excavator when it comes out though. I plan to keep my current system at least that long. Then maybe I'll go one way or the other.
at low end, AMD has been a very competitive solution for internet cafe's here in the Philippines for the past years but now (2012), 8 out of 10 internet cafe's switches to Intel (its a fact, try and make a survey).. sandy bridge pentiums and celerons kick AMD in the lowend where AMD used to shine. Athlon II is very old, Llano is still a good option but who wants a dead end road?
Just from reading the improvement it is obvious the design is for Server workload. And that is great because that is where the money are heading. Consumer market is shrinking with ARM Tablet / Smartphones, as well as their Fusion APU to handle those needs.
But will that be enough? I will have to wait and see the benchmarks on servers software loads. 15% performance is surely not enough, If they could do 15% performance increase while giving a 15% less power usage it may be good enough for now.
Well I am rooting for AMD but this release to me feels like they are pulling their punch. I will not pretend to understand all the tweaks and how it will address their previous design flaws.
But there was no mention of memory controller enhancements, the previous buzz was that AMD was potentially going to introduce quad channel memory controller support much like their servers. Don't quote me but I know I've read it somewhere. I do not see any mention of anything other than they are focusing on latency which is fantastic for power efficiency and mobile platforms however they have no focus on any major improvements to the desktop cpu (referring to the L3 cache reference in the article)
Where is the desktop CPU love? I know myself and many people have desktop computers which are good enough for the here and now, but by 2013/2014 we would love a healthy upgrade from AMD but it looks like 15% year after year is all that is planned but to make matters worse those numbers are completely focused on mobile platforms.
> The improvements look good on paper, but the real question remains whether or not Steamroller will be enough to go up against Haswell.
Why even *pretend* that this is a two horse race anymore?
We _all_ know it will be no match to Haswell. Even with a generous 20% improvement on CPU side, the Steamroller will at best match IVB, let alone IVB-E or whatever the large socket version of IVB will be eventually called. Forget Haswell, which will add another 10-15% over IVB.
And all that is in pure performance per $ metric; Intel will absolutely kill whatever AMD has to offer in the performance / watt.
At best, we will get some good Steamroller based APUs, but those also have limited benefit to users like me since AMD's linux graphic support is virtually non-existant when compared to Intel (http://intellinuxgraphics.org/), and Intel is steadily improving its weak iGPU...
>Elsewhere the rest of the world worries about important stuff and tries to make a living.
And they do this by buying Intel CPUs, apparently, because Intel have over 90% marketshare and it is only increasing day by day. It would appear that having an Intel processor does not get in the way of "important stuff" and "making a living", quiet the contrary.
Only large scale dumping of CPUs / APUs to OEMs at cost price -and their graphic division- has kept AMD alive these past few months. No hope on the horizon, either.
The new AMD architecture is noticeably slower than the last one. My 4 core 965 is faster than the 8150 in many operations - most in fact. It's pathetic and inexcusable.
I'm so disenchanted with AMD that even with all of the integrated video stuff on Intel systems and the extra cost, I am probably going to go with Intel for every purchase in the near future. I'm going to recommend Intel to everyone who asks, especially gamers.
The tradeoff is peak frequency. These heavily automated designs won’t be able to clock as high as the older hand drawn designs.
-Shame they got lazy and went with an automated design when they could of had faster chips if they designed them by hand.
The architecture is still slated to debut in 2013 on GlobalFoundries' 28nm bulk process. The improvements look good on paper, but the real question remains whether or not Steamroller will be enough to go up against Haswell.
-28nm really? Intel will be on it's 2nd gen of 22nm over a year after 22nm debuts for intel and amd still can't match that size. Will steamroller be enough to go up against haswell, thats not even a legit question, haswell is going to obliterate steamroller in every way imaginable. Haswell will most likely run cooler, use less power while at the same time delivering more performance. The only hope for steamroller will be the fusion chips where amd will actually beat intel on the i-gpu. I see a good market for steamroller HTPC's and also steamroller gaming ultrabooks, if you can crossfire the i-gpu with another radeon card it would also make larger 15-17" gaming notebooks attractive. You basically get a free crossfire set up with a big boost in graphics performance without actually having to have 2 power hungry heat producing gpu's. 7970m(or 8970m if its out) + highest level steamroller fusion i-gpu will produce some pretty smooth sexy graphics without needing all this room and extreme cooling and loud fans that accompany dual gpu laptops (sorry m18x I still love you like my child since I have no children)
You know I was an AMD fanboy all the way, and waited, and waited....and waited for Bulldozer, expecting a significant step over my Phenom IIx6 1090T. I used to talk trash with my Intel buddies, and I stuck with AMD through some hard times. And when Bulldozer finally came out and was basically a letdown- I felt burned. AMD has got to do something with their core business model and there fabrication process. Some of these FX chips they're producing are ok, and may have a niche market, but geeze AMD, when you have Intel as your main and only competitor - you've got to step up your A game. And AMD had consistently failed to do that.
Sorry guysbut I gave up and put together an Ivy Bridge rig - and I am amazed at how much smoother and faster it is than my old 1090T rig.
If they don't hit one out of the park soon, I see AMD turning into a second rate company making low-end APUs for OEMs. and of course graphics cards.
PLEASE prove me wrong AMD. Make Steamroller something special.
Hmm, I have a Phenom II X4 965 (and SSD for OS and programs) and my system is completely smooth and almost all everyday tasks are instant, so I'm not sure how you could be seeing that much of a difference. Maybe your OS got bloated up or something?
I have an Intel i7-based notebook provided by my employer, use an HP DL380 G5 (8way 32GB RAM w/ nVidia graphics) as my primary workstation instead, and have a handful of them at home. All of that compute power and I still prefer to use the system which I'm on currently, which is built on an AMD Athlon x64 x2 6400 with and nVidia GeForce 8800 GTS video card and 8GB of RAM.
Being an AMD 'fanboy' combined with how well my home desktop has held up and all the hype leading up to Bulldozer, I've held off on upgrading. Heck, I even took down my servers and have had them stacked in the garage for the last couple of years.
Each missed release date only made it that much more disappointing when Bulldozer finally released and fell far short of expectations. I actually found myself looking forward to the 2nd generation release before the 1st became available. After a few more months of waiting I finally decided to pull the plug on AMD and build an Intel-based system.
Out of pure desperation to be proven wrong by AMD I decided to check and see if there was anything in the pipeline that would persuade me to hold off on clicking the check-out button.
I read 2 other articles prior to this regarding their 3rd generation builds. All 3 the same. Consequently, I sit here asking myself WTF!? Not at AMD (this let down was expected) but at myself. There is no other manufacturer, service provider, or producer that I would tollerate this from, why am accepting it from AMD?
No more... Going to go check out after posting. By time I'm ready to purchase again it'll most likely be a choice between nVidia's upcoming CPU line and Intel - no longer hopeful that AMD will be able to become competitive again.
(I'm well aware that AMD is quite competitive, especially when it comes to price/performance; however, they are so far behind in terms of currency. They don't support the latest technologies/components and most likely won't within the next 3 years - I don't plan to upgrade again within that time so they're out.)
Congratulations. You have achieved what others have repeatedly failed to do. You have broken the darkside grasp of the AMD PR fanboy advertising pump campaign.
" Consequently, I sit here asking myself WTF!? Not at AMD (this let down was expected) but at myself. There is no other manufacturer, service provider, or producer that I would tollerate this from, why am accepting it from AMD? "
It appears your mind has cleared, you have exited enslavement to the Deathstar.
Quote from Laststop311: "-28nm really? Intel will be on it's 2nd gen of 22nm over a year after 22nm debuts for intel and amd still can't match that size. Will steamroller be enough to go up against haswell, thats not even a legit question, haswell is going to obliterate steamroller in every way imaginable."
Response: Intel will always be ahead of AMD in terms of their fab process. This is nothing new. AMD will go to 28 after intel has gone to 22. AMD will then go to 14 after Intel moves to 11 and so on and so forth. Old news. The question isn't whether steamroller will be enough to go up against Haswell. Haswell will be better in every way, you're right. Anyone who tries to argue that isn't well informed. The real question is, will Steamroller be enough to keep AMD in the game and the answer is, if it performs the way they are saying it will, I predict yes, it will for sure keep them in the game. According to AMD's information (I trust this group more than the group in charge of the original Bulldozer who were fired), that Steamroller will perform at least 15% faster than Piledriver, but from what they said at Hot Chips, 30% faster. 30% faster than Piledriver will put it's performance up against Ivy Bridge, possibly Ivy Bridge-E and to be honest, once you're at that level of performance, no one will even notice a 10-20% improvement which is what Haswell is referring to. Most people today wouldn't know the difference if you put a phenom ii x4 in their system or a Sandy bridge. It's only the benchmarkers, hardcore gamers, and enthusiasts that will notice and they only make up a very small portion of the market. If HSA takes off and it might, especially with Samsung having signed on last week, which may spark other companies to join considering Samsung is so huge, and companies start to code for it, Steamroller might actually give AMD a moment of glory that they haven't seen since Athlon 64. If the industry moves toward HSA the way AMD is betting the farm on, Steamroller will actually steamroll Haswell pretty bad, but who knows what the future holds in that regard. Regardless, whether or not HSA takes off, Steamroller should be enough to keep AMD in the game.
Quote by hapkiman: "If they don't hit one out of the park soon, I see AMD turning into a second rate company making low-end APUs for OEMs. and of course graphics cards."
Response: They already are a second rate company making low end APU's for OEMs and of course graphics cards. LOL. They'd HAVE to hit a home run with HSA and Steamroller to truly get back into the first rate game. They've been out of it for a few years now. Thanks to Hector Ruiz (should be Ruinz).
Still think it boils down to what you want. If it does that who cares. Plus I can't spend the money that Itel wants for the newest and best. Amd has done me right for along time. If we didn't hav AMD, Itel would tsake over and I'd hate to see the costs then....
hi everyone, ive read every post here, lol kinda comical in a way with that said just a bit of introduction: been building comps since the 386 and boy we have come a long way im not a rocket scientist by any means but want to say a few things...Mac53 thats pretty much it in a nut shell...but firstly money is always a factor in life cant get around it, there be some that would rather have a corvet but eat bologna for 2 years but so be it...personally i like my steaks... :) secondly..i started out amd and i am still glad they are around, we need competition in life it does drive the wheels to innovation and helps keep prices down...however the business model has sadly changed alot its no longer sell alot and make 20% fair profit now its get what you can get even if you gouge..i digressed a little sorry but here it is...i bought a i7 950 bought 2 years ago...got a nice video card and 6 gig of ram i doubt anyone here can justify for me going out and spending another 600 bucks for the lastest upgrade..nope this rig will take me well into 2016 or when performance of this chip is beaten by at least 30%....and guys dont get me wrong having a hobby is nice...but can you imagine a site dedicated to who makes the best refridgerator !!!!!!!!!! lol just food for thought and thanks for allowing me this oppertunity
Intel have been releasing great products of the last say 4 years I series but the bang for buck is always with AMD and ATI, you can build a great system normally for half the price with AMD and ATI products with the same performance as the Intel based system.
I use both Intel and AMD for work, and yes Intel processors are faster, but when you have a AMD in your computer doesn't seem to cause as many random crashes because they have been developed longer not to just rush out.
plus i like being on the Rebels/under dogs team, as come on everyone likes to bet on the under dog.
We’ve updated our terms. By continuing to use the site and/or by logging into your account, you agree to the Site’s updated Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
126 Comments
Back to Article
mantikos - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - link
This is what Buldozer should've been from the get go pretty muchCeriseCogburn - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
So they're going to build..First they Bulldoze the place
Then they bring in the Piledriver laying the postings
Then the Steamroller for the building surroundings
Next comes Excavator ! to destroy all the former work
Great plan amd...
shtldr - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
And then will come the ultimate AMD CPU, called Undertaker, and bury the company once and for all.rarson - Tuesday, September 18, 2012 - link
Yeah, because screw competition. I want crappy products at high prices. Long live Intel!MrSpadge - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
It looks really promising, indeed. Lot's of fine tuning there, actually more than just "fine". And they don't need to beat Intel for top performance anyway, just keep up the pressure and give us good mainstream chips with solid single thread performance!CeriseCogburn - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
That's what they get beat on all the time, single thread performance - oh and multi thread for that matter.They've been getting creamed on single thread, specifically.
Your exclamation point sure points to a fine fantasy never happening future though given the failure that the present is.
Must take a lot of fanboyism and some strong prozac in the water.
Spunjji - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
Anyone would think that seeing as he's *hoping* for better single-thread performance, that he thus knows *they don't have it now*. But no. You didn't.Must take being a catastrophic ass-hat and some serious piss on your chips for you to jump on somebody for a completely inoffensive post.
CeriseCogburn - Friday, October 12, 2012 - link
Oh, from the uker amd fanboy where prozac is in the water, who prays to god for a return to what he misses about amd.News flash idiot: no one pisses on chips here. That's done where you live.
Now : " just keep up the pressure and give us good mainstream chips with solid single thread performance! "
Anyone with a brain would think we're already there, and will continue to be, pissy boy.
d3mag0gu3 - Tuesday, April 2, 2013 - link
Lol dude. You sound about three years old. Go sit in the corner until you can participate in class properly.redwarrior - Sunday, March 31, 2013 - link
Less and less applications are single-threaded, it's a dying part of the market. AMD is every bit as goodas Intel and better in its price class. Most apps perform betteron FX-8350 than I5 3570k. The FPS are up there with 3770k on many new games. This will only get better over the next year as more and more games offer 8 core processor support. There is absolutely no compelling reason to go Intel for cpu's under $300. With Steamroller the ascension of AMD to a BETTER alternative to Intel will only accelerate. All the initial bad reviews which were based on erroneous testing procedures and old benchmarks are proving to be ancient history and poor analysisOrigin64 - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
Just like Phenom II was what Phenom should've been, but by then it was too late. AMD is always a generation behind.In the notebook market this isn't much of a problem, Intel's even further behind there, but in the mid-end desktop chips it shows. Which is a shame, because mid-end Intel is way too expensive.
Although I still insist that this Bulldozer/steamroller/whatever architecture will have its 15 months of fame when games start running on octocores.
Spunjji - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
Pretty much what you said at the start there. God knows I miss AMD being competitive in the CPU market, but in anything but a "value" sense I don't see them bringing that game for another 2/3 years, if ever.Dracconus - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
If you think that AMD has "always been a generation behind" then you're seriously mistaken. The AMD Athlon 64 series STOMPED the living HELL out of the Pentium 4 series processors and cost less. AMD WAS good at single threaded applications, but they started focusing on the growth abilities of the 64 bit architecture, and lost track of what would in the end be most important. You can't fault a company for looking to the future, and attempting to expand their horizons. Had software developers thought more about the future of hardware instead of the present limitations then things would have gone in AMD's favor CONSIDERABLY.Intel has good processors, we'll give them that. But where they have ALWAYS lacked is price-performance ratio. They don't scale, overclock, cool, or deal with heat as well, and up until the I5 series they BARELY managed to give two shits about power consumption.
Yes, Intel is better for RAW performance, but quite frankly, how many average gamers are going to be able ot afford a 2 thousand dollar processor just to play their favorite game in six years? NONE How many enthusiasts...plenty.
AMD serves a greater portion of the population, and they know it. They just got freaking lazy, and it started to show.
They have a chance to pick it back up, and it's up to them to admit they slipped up, but don't get fooled. Even IF AMD slips, they'll still have budget minded consumers worried about price to performance ratios, and will ALWAYS have customers as long as they're in business solely because of the economic standstill the world is in.
yankeeDDL - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - link
Any idea of when could the first legitimate benchmark start to surface?The lack of competition in the CPU market is not healthy for users, that's for sure.
I'd love to see AMD back in the game in other areas, in addition to Netbooks (with Brazos) and Value (Llano offers pretty good bang for the bucks).
SpamHammer - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
I fail to see how it's been negative to users? Have you seen the cost to performance ratio of Intel's Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge chips?? I mean, seriously! When the Core i5 2500k came out, UN-overclocked, it was able to go toe-to-toe with the $1,000 Intel Core Extreme from the generation before! All this from a chip that runs $220?? That's insane value!The value is only furthered when you take into account its low thermal output, and it's high overhead for over clocking. I have mine OC'd to 4.1GHz, and that's not even beginning to stretch it. I've seen them OC'd to 4.5GHz regularly on air cooling. This isn't "hard" or "the exception to the rule"; it is the norm for these chips. And that's just Sandy Bridge! Ivy Bridge offers a 10-15% improvement right out of the box!
Hell, the Core i3 2100, running *only* $120, despite being just a dual-core chip, is able to easily wipe the floor with even AMD's octo-core Bulldozer and Piledriver chips, in just about every gaming and synthetic benchmark, despite that chip costing nearly twice as much!
It powers my brother's gaming PC, and he's able to run Battlefield 3 on Ultra at 1600x900 (his monitor's resolution) with 50+FPS!
Thanks to all this "non competitive consumer screwing" you're preaching about, I was able to build his entire rig, sans monitor, for $469 shipped!
I mean, you couldn't ask for a better time to buy new PC gear!
thehat2k5 - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
"Battlefield 3 on Ultra at 1600x900 (his monitor's resolution) with 50+FPS!" " for $469 shipped!" Yeah right. Maybe if there was a 75% off sale on video cards where you bought it. BF3 on ultra requires at least a $500 video card, regardless of how much you cheap out on a current cpu.Hell, if you came into my shop with a budget of $469 shipped, i have 7 employees that will laugh at you and kindly hand you a business card from Best Buy with two letters on the back....HP.
that said, the best bang for the bug gaming cpu is the AMD FX4100 for about $140. Why go weak i3 dual core when you can go mid range quad from AMD for $20 more. I like your fairy tale, almost as much as I like some of the ones in the bible.
StevoLincolnite - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
A $500 video card just for Battlefield 3? Seriously? Lol? With that kind of ignorance, I would never wan't to buy from your shop.thehat2k5 - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
If you want it running on Ultra in the middle of a firefight at min. 60fps, you bet! Considering our customers are buying 21.5" LCD's with resolutions of 1980x1050 as a minimum.Even our customers would laugh at the claim of BF3 on Ultra for $469. Sorry guys, i'm no AMD "fanboy", but around here we call a spade a spade. This dudes claim is fantasy based on a bath salts hallucination.
taltamir - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
Your customers are buying 1980x1050 resolution monitors but he explicitly stated his brother is running on a 1600x900Also he said 50FPS+ not 60FPS steady like you are claiming.
thehat2k5 - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
I would like to personally see that running in Ultra at 50fps, even on a 1600x900. If i can sell BF3 Ultra desktops for under $500, i'm going to open a few more stores and put Best Buys computer department out of business lolCeriseCogburn - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
Another amd liar, and here's the proof:http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fx-4100-core-i...
More BS from the amd bs artists of the web.
GaMEChld - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
Wait, I'm confused, who was lying about what? I'm not sure what that toms hardware link was supposed to prove, since both of those guys were talking about BF3 on Ultra settings, and Ultra was not tested on that page you linked. Better dial back the blind AMD hatred, since you were attacking people who were arguing about FPS and price, not Intel and AMD.Spunjji - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
Cerise is a special kind of chimp.Galidou - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
Last time I said something like that to Cerise, he told me I was in a crysis and I had to take midol, careful about what you say around him.CeriseCogburn - Friday, October 12, 2012 - link
Mr dupemeister got the rez wrong, the framerate wrong, then the his cpu recommendation wrong, then he couldn't comprehend when he went to the link, as it clearly shows his crap cpu pick losing to the cheaper Intel chip, after he claimed his crap amd pick was the best bang and 20 bucks more. LOLBut you ragging amd fans who cannot stand an insult expect us all to stand your constantly insulting lies them smile pretty and thank you for your stupid treachery and lies.
Right ?
Okay, thank you so much for having the midol disability that prevents you from being able to think clearly or get anything correct.
CeriseCogburn - Friday, October 12, 2012 - link
You're both blind, mind numbed, idiot doofy bats. Here is his quote idiot #2" that said, the best bang for the bug gaming cpu is the AMD FX4100 for about $140. Why go weak i3 dual core when you can go mid range quad from AMD for $20 more."
Look at the link again, brain dead core amd fan.
Spunjji - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
Bahahahaha, you're such a tool. xDGalidou - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
All that counter-offensive for nothing... He never said he runs it on ULTRA. Boy people nowadays thinks you have to play the games on ultra or else you're just not playing it at all. A radeon 6870 or a 550 ti runs the game at that resolution on high details and it's BEAUTIFUL with over 50 fps...Galidou - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
Well actually he said ultra but there must be some options not enabled like msaa, I beleive it'S totally possible to get that on a 140$ card. I built myself a pc for one of my friend that total with the case did cost me around 350$ total, without hard drive and power supply and that totally runs Battlefield 3 easily on 1600*900 not ultra but almost.Origin64 - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
Unfortunately 60 fps and full hd are the standard these days, so picking custom fps targets and lower resolutions doesn't really count as far as im concernedthehat2k5 - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
at the very least we are suggesting Radeon 7870 or GTX570. How much are those where you come from? Up here, there is no way i can build you a computer for $469 that we will put our name on and certify it for BF3 at Ultra!Origin64 - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
You need at least 2GB of vram to run BF3 on ultra. And the flops to match it of course. Good luck getting that under 400 bucks.Hardin4188 - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
Is it ok if I laugh at all seven of your employees?thehat2k5 - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
it sure is ok, as long as you can link me the parts you are using to make this miracle machine;)Novulux - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
I built a PC for my younger brother with $250 of parts from Microcenter, and gave him two HD 5770s bought on Ebay for ~$110 for both. Bought an HDD from Newegg for $70. He only plays at 1440x900 though.Spunjji - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
Yes, and presumably not at Ultra settings, unless he likes his textures being swapped in/out of RAM constantly..?CeriseCogburn - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
Close your doors hat2k5 - you don't know what you're doing.LOL
Not surprised.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fx-4100-core-i...
hapkiman - Sunday, September 2, 2012 - link
Not trying to stir the pot, but I get around 60 FPS consistently on BF3 with ALL settings on Ultra. Everything, including having ambient occlusion turned on.I have a overclocked XFX Radeon HD 6950, which is not a $500 card.
I have a i7 3770, and 16GB of 1600MHz RAM, and the game and all maps are loading from an Intel 520 160GB SSD.
Believe it or not but its the truth. I just finished a game on Back to Karkand map, and I averaged 50-60 FPS, with spikes going well over 60.
AssBall - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
Cool story, Bro.CeriseCogburn - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
You just can't make up the crap that amd fan boys do, since they are clueless.http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fx-4100-core-i...
The i3 2100 STOMPS the fx4100 .
just4U - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
Overall.. the FX4100 is a better chip in a multi purpose computer. (in my opinion) Normally you will get a better Motherboard (more feature rich) then what you'd get from paying for the Intel boards as well.. so it's all a factor. As to these $469 dream machine.. well hell..A standard gaming rig that I'd be comfortable building (without an OS and at cost) will run .. $574.00
- FX 4100
- 8 G PC 1280
- Gigabyte 970A -D3
- Radeon 7770 1G
- 1 TB Western Digitial Blue
- LG DVDRW
- Antec One Casing
- Corsair Builder 500W
Now going intel you could get an I3 and a H61 at a similiar price.. or you could go for a comparable MB to the Amd one for aprox $10 more over this system.
To get it down into the $400 range I'd have to hmmm.. No video look for a $30 PSU and a $25 Case (save $50..) that would get it around the $450 range.. Drop down to 4G of ram would bring it into the 430.. (get where im going with this?)
just4U - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
That was thru price match here in Canada btw.. I know you can still get some things cheaper down south via combo's and such.. but putting together a half ways competent gaming machine with new computer parts.. in the $450 range.. Good luck with that. Unless you got some killer sale on it's not going to happen.. and forget about the rebates as we all know how those work out 75% of the time. At the end of the day you'd seriously have to compromize with your hardware selection just to get it into such a budget.Spunjji - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
It's cool dude, the people here who aren't mentally defective already know that what you're saying is broadly accurate, pissing matches over AMD/Intel aside. There's not much sense demonstrating it to the rest... :/Spunjji - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
You have a funny definition of "STOMP".Galidou - Sunday, September 2, 2012 - link
3 fps more in one benchmark out of 8 and the other 7 are equal, quite a nice stomping of a core i3 vs a fx 4100. Oh and the core i3 can't be overclocked... what an amazing stomping.CeriseCogburn - Friday, October 12, 2012 - link
It can be overclocked, and dumb dumb, the op liar said $20 more for your amd loser.So in this case, the amd fanboys blow their freaking brains out through their backsides again, they actually LOSE, and pay $20 more.
Thanks, I'll keep that in mind when you idiots all collude in the GPU reviews, and pull the EXACT OPPOSITE in clan idiot mode and fail to notice how stupid you all are even after it is explicitly pointed out, and "coming to grips" "with reality" and admitting you supported the big fat lie, of course will never occur.
That's the fruitcake liar amd fan. Of course anyone else who takes exception to it, they are in the wrong...
The amd fanboy mind is a terribly wasted thing, throw it out.
Spunjji - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
You couldn't really be a more transparent shill. Nobody mentioned "non competitive consumer screwing" here, yet you post an essay countering said imaginary comments backed up by some hand-waving and supposition which is disproven by easily-obtained facts. You started a whole argument though, so gz on that.nicamarvin - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
15% IPC improvement right out of the box? keep dreaming, Ivy max performance boost is 5% on "some" benches and 1 to 3% on most benches and seeing how it cant OC as much as SandyB I say AMD will catch up with Intel sooner than most of you thoughtkeeping in mind that AMD plans to encrease IPC by 15% on each of their updated Modules, PileDriver is already doing just that(15% IPC performance boost clock per clock against BD) and that Piledriver module was lacking the L3 cache the BD Module had and still was pulling the 15% performance boost
seapeople - Friday, August 31, 2012 - link
Ivy Bridge also came out with higher clocks for the same price, so add in the 1-5% IPC advantage and you get close to the 10-15% advantage mentioned.Note that he didn't say IPC.
nicamarvin - Friday, August 31, 2012 - link
SB can Oc much higher than Ivy, so thats a moot point, whats a 1-5% IPC gain when SB can OC 10% higher than Ivy? I suspect Haswell will not OC as high as the best SB couldCeriseCogburn - Friday, October 12, 2012 - link
" AMD will catch up with Intel sooner than most of you thought "LOL
Most think never, so how much sooner is sooner than never ?
aesthetics84 - Sunday, May 26, 2013 - link
So.... PS4 and Xbox One are both releasing with 8 core AMD cpus, "Never" is looking pretty damn close on that horizon, eh bud? Intel fanboys like you are about to be throwing more money away to try and keep up. Be sure to put that Haswell, you'll inevitably get, under water and fill the res with your sweet, sweet fanboy tears.phdchristmas - Sunday, September 9, 2012 - link
Extreme editions are priced that high because they are the bleeding edge that pave the way for the next generation of chips. Funding for continued research on producing a high production chip of its kind.rarson - Tuesday, September 18, 2012 - link
No, they're priced that high because demand for them is low. Supply and demand.CeriseCogburn - Friday, October 12, 2012 - link
Wrong again rarson. Demand for any item can be very high, and drive the lacking supply price higher and higher.In this case they are priced high because there is sufficient demand to sustain that top tier price. If the demand was low, the price would drop, YOU AMD FANBOY brainfarter.
( do you feel better your self installed idiot version of economics "proved" to you internally that demand for the big top Intel chip is very low ?)
LOL - so sad.....the emotions of a fanboy farting out uncontrollably, econ dumb oh one we'll call it.
I'm beginning to understand why you amd freaks have twisted penny pinching frustrated price obsessions, you haven't a clue about the very basics, but your mind is very willing to arrogantly and in error, attempt to "correct others" with amd fanboyism as the leading call in the emotionally fulfilling statements you offer.
It is like a crazy girl having her period and blurting out her out of control emotions. LOL
No wonder I told giraradou or whatever miss sensitive's name is to take the midol.
rarson - Tuesday, September 18, 2012 - link
Regardless of what prices are now, they'd be even better with better competition from AMD. It's called "economics."CeriseCogburn - Friday, October 12, 2012 - link
In this case it's called " amd fanboy fantasy "rocketbuddha - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - link
Anand was that a typo or really AMD is going to use TSMC 28nm to manufacture Steamroller based APUs?Paedric - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - link
They're supposed to switch from GF to TSMC sometimes soon.I guess that's the when, if it hasn't happened already.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - link
Er that's my mistake, GF 28nm is correct. Fixed :)Take care,
Anand
rocketbuddha - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - link
Thanks.. With STM licensing FDSOI 28nm to GF , which AMD can use for a path towards atleast improving Vishera series with a die-shrink it makes little sense for AMD to move to TSMC now. Easier would it be for AMD to chose from the multiple IBM bulk consortium members for fabbing rather than TSMC which is all by itself and go to for any 28nm manufacturing today.freezervv - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - link
"Load operations (two operands) are also compressed so that they only take a single entry in the physical register file, which helps increase the effective SIDE of each RF."alpha754293 - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - link
It still only has a single FPU unit (and no matter how you divde up the 128-bits); in the real-world, it probably means that it'll only use half of it at any given time.So, it's still gonna suck.
Don't forget that computers are really just really BIG, glorified calculators. And without the FPU; it won't be able to do much of what it's intended/designed to do in the first place.
cotak - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - link
For FPU related work maybe. AMD's stated before their vision is to move FPU work off onto the GPU side of things. If their plans are still in place the FPU is just a place holder for the time being.I am not saying it's the right choice but it's what they have said they wanted to do.
At any rate a fast integer processing rate already goes a long way towards making a computer feel fast for most users. And for a lot of server tasks it would be good enough.
HPC-Top10 - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
You are correct. With only a single FPU unit, it will only be in use half the time. We have 40,000+ AMD Interlagos cores, yet tell our users to run on only half of them to get better performance. We have 32 cores per node, yet if a user runs on all 32, their HPC codes run slower. By running on 16 cores, thus wasting the other 16 cores, their HPC codes run faster. This is not true for every single code, but it is true for many of them.Beenthere - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - link
It really doesn't matter to most folks if Steamroller is as good or better than Haswell. The real question is does Steamroller continue to up performance and meet the needs of Mainstream consumers. That is where money is made, not in the 5% of the market that buys over-hyped, over-priced, top-of-the-line CPUs (or GPUs). If Steamroller continues AMD's 15% performance bumps it will be a sales hit just as Trinity is and Vishera will be.Most people don't care what brand of CPU/APU or GPU is in their PC. All they care is that the PC functions as desired and the price is affordable. I'm confident that AMD will continue to serve their needs quite well.
BTW, the fallacy that moving from one process to a lower sized process is still a big deal, i.e. 32nm to 22nm, it untrue. It has power consumption advantages for ULV but for everything else, other design parameters are far more important than the process node these days, as Intel learned with tri-gate Ivy Bridge which has leakage and OC'ing issues.
In regards to benches, people might as well get use to the Intel bias and make their purchasing decisions based on actual system performance because Intel is good at buying favor on benches.
jabber - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - link
Yep, always amazed how many here still haven't woken up to the fact that the CPU world doesn't revolve around them.Also that 90% of the worlds computer users switched off caring the minute dual core CPUs came out years ago.
Lot of denial in the enthusiast world, hence probably why AMD quite bothering with them.
"Is it cheap, will it do Ebay and can my daughter play the Sims on it?"
Thats all the criteria needed in most cases.
BenchPress - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - link
You sound like the people who said 1 GHz is enough for everybody...The reality is that the mainstream market follows in the footsteps of the enthusiast market. So sooner or later everybody is affected by the directions AMD and Intel are taking today. And these are quite exciting times. AMD is betting the farm on heterogeneous computing with HSA, while Intel is revolutionizing homogeneous high throughput computing with AVX2 and TSX. It's really the equivalent of the 'RISC versus CISC' debate of this decade. Perhaps 99.9% of the world's population doesn't care about these things at all, and you're free to join them, but it's what brought you eBay and The Sims at an affordable price!
Computers have evolved from mere tools, to becoming part of our lives. In the future we'll probably interact even closer with them, for instance through speech and natural gestures. This requires lots of additional innovation.
FunBunny2 - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - link
Nope, but almost. The circle dance had been Intel/MicroSoft: Intel needed windoze bloat to justify the performance ramp, and MicroSoft needed Intel to ramp to support dreadful windoze.Multi-processor/core and parallelism is going to be some hurdle for Amdahl constrained single threaded apps. Which is most of them, in the consumer PC world.
Computers have evolved from being computers to being entertainment appliances. That Jobs for that.
Spunjji - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
LolJobsNo.jabber - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - link
You keep believing that.The computing world does not revolve around mainly males aged between 14 to 25 playing Crysis.
Sorry to burst your bubble.
swaaye - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - link
I think you forgot to read what you replied to.jabber - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
It was a reply to Benchpress.About time a modern forum got some modern comments software.
MySchizoBuddy - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
so far all these cries of a modern comment system has fallen on deaf ears.rocketbuddha - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - link
I look at it slightly different. AMD is totally dependent right now on its OEM partners to push its processors into products that the consumers/market wants.Let us take Trinity for example. A excellent mobile APU and improvement over Llano in every single way. With AMD giving OEMs all the freedom to differentiate compared to the strict Ultabook guidelines that Intel forces, you should see a huge number of Ultra Thins (UT)
But what the OEMs are doing is equipping Trinity based NB/UT with substandard hardware. Worse they are pricing them so friggin close to low-end ultrabooks or UB like a little thicker notebooks with a better performance to hit AMD at all ends.
So now we have Brazos 2 systems fighting the simple Ivy pentiums which is not its intended competition and Trinity systems against Ivy systems sometimes with a discrete basic NVIDIA chip which can come close/exceed Trinity's graphics performance with a more powerful and efficient CPU.
So AMD who can just compete in Price/price to performance market right now have
a) Intel based systems very close in price in consumer market.
b) High-end gaming is now solely Intel
c) Stable (repeatedly rewarding) business market firm on the Intel camp.
d) Intel firmly owning the low-power market (expensive) due to technology advantage.
That is the reason AMD is missing revenues while Intel is growing albeit at a slower pace.
Conficio - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
You are right and you are wrong.Totally agree that there are many computer uses where CPU speed and architecture does nto matter that much.
Unfortunately, the laptop OEMs have nto yet caught on to this. They still produce only crappy systems with crappy screens and crappy keyboards/mousepads (and in extension flexing cases). Or they go ultra light/thin and add unnecessary GPU and top of the line quad core CPUs
I think AMD needs to play its cards for affordable systems not just for cheap systems, but for an affordable middle ground, where the UX is quality and the chips are just good enough for the non gamer. AMD could do a lot with a good branding. Where is the AMD equivalent of UltraBooks with standards for solid keyboards, high res/high quality (IPS) screens, etc. At the end a CPU with a decent GPU (good enough for photo/video viewing and the OS animation gimmicks) shines much more in a solid combination. Call them EverydayBooks or A-Class laptops (as in AMD class)
CeriseCogburn - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
Whom is going to build these amd wonders I ask.AMD couldn't get their damned fan design correct on the 69xx series and had to SHAVE PLASTIC CORNERS on the 6 pin connector.
I shudder to think AMD would have a hand in the design... they can't do basic measuring correct - and go to production with that kind of fault.
I suspect AMD internally is a bunch of scared losers who dare not speak out about problems lest they "get canned for the sake of the bottom line".
That grows into a real problem very quickly - different parts of the company not communicating with other portions - STOVEPIPED management with workers, engineers, groups, blocks, all living in fear...
SOMEONE needs to straighten it out - a modern government, secret agency, AND corporation cannot function properly if secrecy due to fear or stovepiping or "security" and/or protecting one's domain is the REASON for the silence and lack of communication...
In that environment people "give up" pretty quickly and "work with what they've got" which is less than they need to get it done correctly.
It's like AMD drivers - " I didn't know anything was wrong " says Catalyst Maker.... that kind of level of total and utter lack of communication.
Galidou - Sunday, September 2, 2012 - link
You speak like everyhting is so simple working building video cards and processors. It's so easy that everyone at home should build their own freaking parts, it's so easy... But still you ahve so much knowledge about management but you spend your timje spreading hate on forums about AMD AMD AMD....''I suspect AMD internally is a bunch of scared losers''
You jsut suspect too much things, go back to your design of the processor and video card that will dominate them all, it seems so easy after all.
CeriseCogburn - Friday, October 12, 2012 - link
Oh must have really severed that nerve as the reality cut through to the bone.You're fired !
(so another amd employee left - of course the emp was told it's layoffs again, but we all know crap under performance leads to it, and is effectively a firing no matter the name, or the nature, as in the boss saying "turn in your resignation")
Aren't you touchy feely types all about minimizing the hostile work environment ...
You ever been onboard a sinking ship miss touchy ?
ifrit39 - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - link
While I agree with your comment about 'good enough' performance for mainstream users, I don't agree with the idea that process node shrinks are not important.Most of the consumer market uses their pcs simply for we browsing, email, and video. There has been an enormous shift from desktop to notebook and now to tablet and other mobile and light devices. This shift is enabled by process node shrinks that reduce power consumption and heat to reasonable levels and allow greater performance in smaller form factors. I think core 2 duo was 'good enough' to meet basic needs without feeling sluggish. But what user could complain about an extra hour of battery life?
If you read AT regularly, you'll see the impact that node shrinks have on battery life, power consumption, and heat/noise. Ivy bridge is no different and neither is any
flgt - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - link
I doubt it was AMD's master plan to give up the juicy profit margins in high performance and enterprise applications. I'm guessing that AMD would kill to have the revenue that Intel is pulling in from those small number of processors. AMD just can't compete hence the need to fall back to the low margin value business.CeriseCogburn - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
I had several friends predict the crap that bulldozer is long before it arrived simply by perusing leaks of the achitecture.If my less than certified yet sentient friends can read the writing on the wall concerning the architecture choices long before they actually arrive...what the heck is wrong with amd's design teams ?
"Can't compete" is usually a phrase I toss out for it's overtly exaggerated usage, but in this case I make an exception.
Somehow amd found some light in the GPU arena concerning the same thing, then their drivers fall flat on their face far too often, ruining the core work.
I certainly hope their new hires can straighten out the mess, but hope for change has not been a well placed bet of late.
brucek2 - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
What forum do you think you're on? Yes, if you want to debate the likely impact to AMD's volume sales, overall adoption of this family of chips, etc. there are many factors that are lot more significant than what its peak performance is like (even though you left most of those out, and hint, individual consumer preference has a lot less to do with it than it should.)But this is not motleyfool or another stock discussion site, nor one that really is much interested with "mainstream consumers" in general. This is a site for hardware enthusiasts, and the big question most of us are going to have is, a) is this a chip we might be interested in having in one of our systems, and b) what technologies does it bring to the table that might be interesting as far as overall technical evolution of computing?
In short, the article is correct, the big question for this forum and this audience is how will it stack up against Haswell.
CeriseCogburn - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
The answer is the same in both cases, so you complained, then agreed, unwittingly.r3fug3 - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
Ivy's OC issues are not from the die shrinkage... Its from the method used to attach the heat shield.HighTech4US - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - link
> "Is it cheap, will it do Ebay and can my daughter play the Sims on it?"> Thats all the criteria needed in most cases.
In that case just get a $200 tablet.
The Nexus 7 would do just fine with those criteria .
jabber - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - link
And there you have the decline of the desktop PC.Get used to it.
You will all be part of a smaller and smaller club.
swaaye - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - link
Most people have always bought low end hardware so not much has changed. There are some more options now in tablets but those aren't really a replacement for a notebook/desktop because they have many constraints. My impression is they are used alongside normal computers.swaaye - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - link
I should say - alongside or as a supplementary media consumption toy.CeriseCogburn - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
Yes, and PC sales are rising - with the population.There is a point though, as overall percentage is of course, and has been, of course, not rising, as more gadgets tending toward mobile use are developed, and that has been occurring for some time now.
Unless the world population becomes completely nomadic 24/7/365, PC's are not going away.
StevoLincolnite - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
The Desktop isn't going anywhere, neither is it shrinking, the sales rate is merely slowing down as everyone has one.Netbooks hit the same wall a couple years ago, tablets and phones will hit the wall in due time.
The Netbook didn't kill off the laptop, the laptop didn't kill off the desktop, they all compliment each other.
We have been in a post-pc world since early 2000 and in that time the sales of PC's have tripled.
Conficio - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
I'd like you to see bid frequently (daily or more) and successfully on eBay items on a Nexus 7.Not to mention the crowd of people that actually sell something on eBay. have fun uploading multiple pictures and typing longer descriptions on an eBay item on a tablet.
Hrel - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - link
Let me know when AMD releases a new CPU that is at least 100% faster than their last CPU. Cause that's the only time I'll consider them even being an option again. Honestly AMD, add SMT. The performance gain/watt is amazing. You can still have more cores, but have SMT too.Taft12 - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - link
Define faster.CeriseCogburn - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
Something that doesn't get renamed "crapdozer". LOLnicamarvin - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
Ivy is only 5% faster than Sandy, let me know when Intel releases a new CPU thats at least 100% faster than their las CPULepton87 - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - link
Not by a long shot. All we can expect this steaming pile of shitty engineering is to be competitive with nehalem. Still worse ST performance but better MT performance. There's only so much you can do with polishing a turd.CeriseCogburn - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
But what if it becomes a petrified turd from being around so long and getting buried all the time ?Then it seems it could be a really hard, polished up.... legendary find ?
nicamarvin - Friday, August 31, 2012 - link
good thing these are processors and not Turds, and they can and will be polishedBelard - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - link
AMD as a whole, needs to streamline their entire consumer line. The Steamroller sounds good in everyway - but we need to see it. By the time it comes out, I'll be chugging along with my intel i5 CPU... my Core2Quad is actually holding up pretty damn good.Much of my AMD friends and clients have gone intel already. But, I have no problems building an AMD system as long as it provides good performance for the price... which is something the FX DID not come close to doing. There is simply NO way I can recommend any FX CPU to anyone... The A-series for low-end is fine. Windows8 is another thing to mess things up, hopefully Windows7 will be available for us IT /small tech people to continue building and selling systems.
The problems (I see) with the AMD mess, which should hopefully be cleared up by 2013. Currently, AMD has 3 different sockets on the market. Its confusing as to what chip goes with which chipset etc etc. Socket A+ needs to die. The CPUs need to be like Core i-series, ALL of them have a GPU built in -THAT can be used as a co-processor if not used for graphics at any time. It simplify the SKUs.
Socket FM1 is dead... Socket FM2 is currently shipping only from OEMs (HP, etc). But the bone-head thing is that FM2 is not at all compatible with FM1 - yet current FM2 motherboards use the EXACT same AMD north bridge! WTF?! FM2 doesn't support PCIe 3.0 And according to the LAST AMD roadmap I've seen, AMD won't have a PCIe 3.0 chipset until 2014? Hey, doesn't AMD sell PCIe 3.0 video cards? Yep... and you can't use them on an AMD powered computer... how stupid. FM1/2 chipset are more advanced than AM3 as they have native USB 3.0 support.
AMD needs to get their butt into gear. There should only be FM2, a NEW chipset in 2013 with PCIe 3.0 support. The new Steamroller CPUs should have a whole new brand name and model number. "FX" has been poisoned. AMD ruined the name of FX from the past.
How about Athlon III X4-3400 (quad core @ 3.4Ghz)?
I hope AMD does well... I'm not counting on it... but they may not be as stupid as Microsoft.
AssBall - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
You can run a 3.0 card on a 2.0 lane just fine. Dunno what you are talking about. And you can't even saturare a 2.0 x16 with a top end card, so what's the big deal?CeriseCogburn - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
The big deal is amd is such an assball.Kiijibari - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - link
Hi,I dont see how this:
"Now each core has its own 4-wide instruction decoder,"
and the statement of "+25% max-width dispatches per thread"
fit together. Seems a bit strange to have +100% Decode power if there is only +25% dispatch improvement.
DanNeely - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
Read the footnote on the slide. The amount of hardware went up by 100%; the 25% number is the actual average throughput gain AMD saw in their testing. IOW ~25% of the time Bulldozer/Piledriver's shared decode maxed out in cases where a wider decode could have done more instructions at the same time.Southernsharky - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - link
Well its not a great processor, but it does sound like AMD is putting some thought into it.They really need to hyper-evolve this Bulldozer junk and get something that is competitive out.
I'm still rolling along with my Phenom II 6 core, and it ain't bad really, even in basic gaming like League of Legends. But I imagine I'd be better off going Intel on my next rig. I'll still take a look at Excavator when it comes out though. I plan to keep my current system at least that long. Then maybe I'll go one way or the other.
Angrybird - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - link
at low end, AMD has been a very competitive solution for internet cafe's here in the Philippines for the past years but now (2012), 8 out of 10 internet cafe's switches to Intel (its a fact, try and make a survey).. sandy bridge pentiums and celerons kick AMD in the lowend where AMD used to shine. Athlon II is very old, Llano is still a good option but who wants a dead end road?Death666Angel - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
If it's a fact, you should have the survey you base that fact on.iwod - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - link
Just from reading the improvement it is obvious the design is for Server workload. And that is great because that is where the money are heading. Consumer market is shrinking with ARM Tablet / Smartphones, as well as their Fusion APU to handle those needs.But will that be enough? I will have to wait and see the benchmarks on servers software loads. 15% performance is surely not enough, If they could do 15% performance increase while giving a 15% less power usage it may be good enough for now.
elerick - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
Well I am rooting for AMD but this release to me feels like they are pulling their punch. I will not pretend to understand all the tweaks and how it will address their previous design flaws.But there was no mention of memory controller enhancements, the previous buzz was that AMD was potentially going to introduce quad channel memory controller support much like their servers. Don't quote me but I know I've read it somewhere. I do not see any mention of anything other than they are focusing on latency which is fantastic for power efficiency and mobile platforms however they have no focus on any major improvements to the desktop cpu (referring to the L3 cache reference in the article)
Where is the desktop CPU love? I know myself and many people have desktop computers which are good enough for the here and now, but by 2013/2014 we would love a healthy upgrade from AMD but it looks like 15% year after year is all that is planned but to make matters worse those numbers are completely focused on mobile platforms.
meloz - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
> The improvements look good on paper, but the real question remains whether or not Steamroller will be enough to go up against Haswell.Why even *pretend* that this is a two horse race anymore?
We _all_ know it will be no match to Haswell. Even with a generous 20% improvement on CPU side, the Steamroller will at best match IVB, let alone IVB-E or whatever the large socket version of IVB will be eventually called. Forget Haswell, which will add another 10-15% over IVB.
And all that is in pure performance per $ metric; Intel will absolutely kill whatever AMD has to offer in the performance / watt.
At best, we will get some good Steamroller based APUs, but those also have limited benefit to users like me since AMD's linux graphic support is virtually non-existant when compared to Intel (http://intellinuxgraphics.org/), and Intel is steadily improving its weak iGPU...
fic2 - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
I was thinking that he actually meant Sandy Bridge or possibly Ivy Bridge instead of Haswell... - it is what he should have meant anyway.jabber - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
..."Shock as AMD chip fails to excite minority tech audience in numerous pointless synthetic benchmarks that no one with a life cares about!"Elsewhere the rest of the world worries about important stuff and tries to make a living.
meloz - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
>Elsewhere the rest of the world worries about important stuff and tries to make a living.And they do this by buying Intel CPUs, apparently, because Intel have over 90% marketshare and it is only increasing day by day. It would appear that having an Intel processor does not get in the way of "important stuff" and "making a living", quiet the contrary.
Only large scale dumping of CPUs / APUs to OEMs at cost price -and their graphic division- has kept AMD alive these past few months. No hope on the horizon, either.
jabber - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
The follow up story - 'IT Folks constantly fail to understand irony shock!'Aaron73 - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
"Elsewhere the rest of the world worries about important stuff and tries to make a living."Apparently not you, as you have posted multiple pointless comments to this article. I happened to notice while on my lunch break.
Sub Zero - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
The new AMD architecture is noticeably slower than the last one. My 4 core 965 is faster than the 8150 in many operations - most in fact. It's pathetic and inexcusable.I'm so disenchanted with AMD that even with all of the integrated video stuff on Intel systems and the extra cost, I am probably going to go with Intel for every purchase in the near future. I'm going to recommend Intel to everyone who asks, especially gamers.
AMD is just not worth putting any money into.
Laststop311 - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
The tradeoff is peak frequency. These heavily automated designs won’t be able to clock as high as the older hand drawn designs.-Shame they got lazy and went with an automated design when they could of had faster chips if they designed them by hand.
The architecture is still slated to debut in 2013 on GlobalFoundries' 28nm bulk process. The improvements look good on paper, but the real question remains whether or not Steamroller will be enough to go up against Haswell.
-28nm really? Intel will be on it's 2nd gen of 22nm over a year after 22nm debuts for intel and amd still can't match that size. Will steamroller be enough to go up against haswell, thats not even a legit question, haswell is going to obliterate steamroller in every way imaginable. Haswell will most likely run cooler, use less power while at the same time delivering more performance. The only hope for steamroller will be the fusion chips where amd will actually beat intel on the i-gpu. I see a good market for steamroller HTPC's and also steamroller gaming ultrabooks, if you can crossfire the i-gpu with another radeon card it would also make larger 15-17" gaming notebooks attractive. You basically get a free crossfire set up with a big boost in graphics performance without actually having to have 2 power hungry heat producing gpu's. 7970m(or 8970m if its out) + highest level steamroller fusion i-gpu will produce some pretty smooth sexy graphics without needing all this room and extreme cooling and loud fans that accompany dual gpu laptops (sorry m18x I still love you like my child since I have no children)
hapkiman - Sunday, September 2, 2012 - link
You know I was an AMD fanboy all the way, and waited, and waited....and waited for Bulldozer, expecting a significant step over my Phenom IIx6 1090T. I used to talk trash with my Intel buddies, and I stuck with AMD through some hard times. And when Bulldozer finally came out and was basically a letdown- I felt burned. AMD has got to do something with their core business model and there fabrication process. Some of these FX chips they're producing are ok, and may have a niche market, but geeze AMD, when you have Intel as your main and only competitor - you've got to step up your A game. And AMD had consistently failed to do that.Sorry guysbut I gave up and put together an Ivy Bridge rig - and I am amazed at how much smoother and faster it is than my old 1090T rig.
If they don't hit one out of the park soon, I see AMD turning into a second rate company making low-end APUs for OEMs. and of course graphics cards.
PLEASE prove me wrong AMD. Make Steamroller something special.
mikato - Tuesday, September 4, 2012 - link
Hmm, I have a Phenom II X4 965 (and SSD for OS and programs) and my system is completely smooth and almost all everyday tasks are instant, so I'm not sure how you could be seeing that much of a difference. Maybe your OS got bloated up or something?AVoyeur4U - Friday, September 14, 2012 - link
I have an Intel i7-based notebook provided by my employer, use an HP DL380 G5 (8way 32GB RAM w/ nVidia graphics) as my primary workstation instead, and have a handful of them at home. All of that compute power and I still prefer to use the system which I'm on currently, which is built on an AMD Athlon x64 x2 6400 with and nVidia GeForce 8800 GTS video card and 8GB of RAM.Being an AMD 'fanboy' combined with how well my home desktop has held up and all the hype leading up to Bulldozer, I've held off on upgrading. Heck, I even took down my servers and have had them stacked in the garage for the last couple of years.
Each missed release date only made it that much more disappointing when Bulldozer finally released and fell far short of expectations. I actually found myself looking forward to the 2nd generation release before the 1st became available. After a few more months of waiting I finally decided to pull the plug on AMD and build an Intel-based system.
Out of pure desperation to be proven wrong by AMD I decided to check and see if there was anything in the pipeline that would persuade me to hold off on clicking the check-out button.
I read 2 other articles prior to this regarding their 3rd generation builds. All 3 the same. Consequently, I sit here asking myself WTF!? Not at AMD (this let down was expected) but at myself. There is no other manufacturer, service provider, or producer that I would tollerate this from, why am accepting it from AMD?
No more... Going to go check out after posting. By time I'm ready to purchase again it'll most likely be a choice between nVidia's upcoming CPU line and Intel - no longer hopeful that AMD will be able to become competitive again.
(I'm well aware that AMD is quite competitive, especially when it comes to price/performance; however, they are so far behind in terms of currency. They don't support the latest technologies/components and most likely won't within the next 3 years - I don't plan to upgrade again within that time so they're out.)
CeriseCogburn - Friday, October 12, 2012 - link
Congratulations. You have achieved what others have repeatedly failed to do.You have broken the darkside grasp of the AMD PR fanboy advertising pump campaign.
" Consequently, I sit here asking myself WTF!? Not at AMD (this let down was expected) but at myself. There is no other manufacturer, service provider, or producer that I would tollerate this from, why am accepting it from AMD? "
It appears your mind has cleared, you have exited enslavement to the Deathstar.
MLSCrow - Wednesday, September 5, 2012 - link
Quote from Laststop311: "-28nm really? Intel will be on it's 2nd gen of 22nm over a year after 22nm debuts for intel and amd still can't match that size. Will steamroller be enough to go up against haswell, thats not even a legit question, haswell is going to obliterate steamroller in every way imaginable."Response: Intel will always be ahead of AMD in terms of their fab process. This is nothing new. AMD will go to 28 after intel has gone to 22. AMD will then go to 14 after Intel moves to 11 and so on and so forth. Old news. The question isn't whether steamroller will be enough to go up against Haswell. Haswell will be better in every way, you're right. Anyone who tries to argue that isn't well informed. The real question is, will Steamroller be enough to keep AMD in the game and the answer is, if it performs the way they are saying it will, I predict yes, it will for sure keep them in the game. According to AMD's information (I trust this group more than the group in charge of the original Bulldozer who were fired), that Steamroller will perform at least 15% faster than Piledriver, but from what they said at Hot Chips, 30% faster. 30% faster than Piledriver will put it's performance up against Ivy Bridge, possibly Ivy Bridge-E and to be honest, once you're at that level of performance, no one will even notice a 10-20% improvement which is what Haswell is referring to. Most people today wouldn't know the difference if you put a phenom ii x4 in their system or a Sandy bridge. It's only the benchmarkers, hardcore gamers, and enthusiasts that will notice and they only make up a very small portion of the market. If HSA takes off and it might, especially with Samsung having signed on last week, which may spark other companies to join considering Samsung is so huge, and companies start to code for it, Steamroller might actually give AMD a moment of glory that they haven't seen since Athlon 64. If the industry moves toward HSA the way AMD is betting the farm on, Steamroller will actually steamroll Haswell pretty bad, but who knows what the future holds in that regard. Regardless, whether or not HSA takes off, Steamroller should be enough to keep AMD in the game.
Quote by hapkiman: "If they don't hit one out of the park soon, I see AMD turning into a second rate company making low-end APUs for OEMs. and of course graphics cards."
Response: They already are a second rate company making low end APU's for OEMs and of course graphics cards. LOL. They'd HAVE to hit a home run with HSA and Steamroller to truly get back into the first rate game. They've been out of it for a few years now. Thanks to Hector Ruiz (should be Ruinz).
mack53 - Wednesday, September 12, 2012 - link
Still think it boils down to what you want. If it does that who cares. Plus I can't spend the money that Itel wants for the newest and best. Amd has done me right for along time. If we didn't hav AMD, Itel would tsake over and I'd hate to see the costs then....HexiumVII - Sunday, April 7, 2013 - link
Imagine the win ultrabook/tablet when AMD can put a Core class ( even first gen will do) CPU with their Radeon APUs. Common AMD go!scorpysr - Tuesday, June 11, 2013 - link
hi everyone,ive read every post here, lol kinda comical in a way with that said just a bit of introduction: been building comps since the 386 and boy we have come a long way im not a rocket scientist by any means but want to say a few things...Mac53 thats pretty much it in a nut shell...but firstly money is always a factor in life cant get around it, there be some that would rather have a corvet but eat bologna for 2 years but so be it...personally i like my steaks... :) secondly..i started out amd and i am still glad they are around, we need competition in life it does drive the wheels to innovation and helps keep prices down...however the business model has sadly changed alot its no longer sell alot and make 20% fair profit now its get what you can get even if you gouge..i digressed a little sorry but here it is...i bought a i7 950 bought 2 years ago...got a nice video card and 6 gig of ram i doubt anyone here can justify for me going out and spending another 600 bucks for the lastest upgrade..nope this rig will take me well into 2016 or when performance of this chip is beaten by at least 30%....and guys dont get me wrong having a hobby is nice...but can you imagine a site dedicated to who makes the best refridgerator !!!!!!!!!! lol just food for thought and
thanks for allowing me this oppertunity
cheers
gareth112 - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Intel have been releasing great products of the last say 4 years I series but the bang for buck is always with AMD and ATI, you can build a great system normally for half the price with AMD and ATI products with the same performance as the Intel based system.I use both Intel and AMD for work, and yes Intel processors are faster, but when you have a AMD in your computer doesn't seem to cause as many random crashes because they have been developed longer not to just rush out.
plus i like being on the Rebels/under dogs team, as come on everyone likes to bet on the under dog.