izzytoots said:
I hear different things from all sorts of people.
All those rumors about a series amd's really being hyperthreaded dual cores. I just never know what to think unless someone with experience with both tells me. And the Intel fanboys sometimes ruin the accurate info i can get.
But yeah, your answer makes sense to me. Good Laptops with haswell i5s don't exist for under $800, so i guess ill just get an a8? Ill wait for some more feedback. Its time for me.to sleep now anyways. To late for me.
that's an intel fanboy rambling. I'll even explain the genesis of that claim... See back in the mid 2000's when AMD was slaughtering the P4 with their athlons, Intel came out with hyperthreading, which was a software scheduling trick to use unscheduled cpu cycles to work on new projects. it was a brilliant idea that really sucked in implementation (generally hyper threading really killed single threaded performance for their p4s in it's first implementation, a problem intel didn't iron out until the core i series). what was hilarious though was intel, hurting for good PR, launched an ad campaign claiming to have the worlds first "dual core" cpus... calling their hyper threaded p4s "dual cores" everywhere they could.
Of course AMD released the first true dual cores on their athlon lineup, and continued their mid decade domination for a few more years, and as we know that came to an end when the first edition phenoms were a flop giving up the performance crown to the first flight core2duos, anyway time passes, and on message boards from time to time amd fanboys mock out intel for their "fake" dual cores or their "fake" quad cores... now intel had stopped claiming HT was an actual "core" when the core2duo came out, mostly because that would REALLY confuse people, and they needed to keep their marketing clean... and of course hyperthreading had sorta a bad rep at the time... so the amd fanboys had their fun talking about the fake intel cores for the better part of a decade before we come to bulldozer.
Now bulldozer was a really creative idea that's never really panned out for AMD. AMD thought that if they took the pipelines leading into their cores and out of them, and the caches which attached to certain cores and shared them, they could save a lot of space on the CPU and a lot of ENERGY, while reducing heat, in short they could add a lot of cores in a smaller space while saving on power and heat at the same time. Bulldozer does build full cores, then it shares parts on the front and back end of the chip with a 2nd paired core, sharing resources in something called a core module. Its not a fake core, it's a real core that shares parts with another core... The idea sorta works... unfortunately we don't know how fast the bulldozer/piledriver cores really are as the design actually handicaps them pretty significantly, preventing them from ever achieving full utilization. most of the time bulldozer/piledriver cores are stuck doing NOTHING, while they wait for info to reach them from the ram. in short they're data starved and slowed down because of it.
There is nothing "software" about the cores in an amd FX/APU chip. the claim they're fake cores is just an old fanboy insult thrown back at AMD fanboys. it's sorta funny because the problem piledriver/bulldozer has is poor scheduling, which ironically is exactly the opposite of hyper threading, which is sorta super scheduling. the fake intel cores exist because of an incredibly ingenious scheduling trick, while the very real bulldozer/piledriver cores suffer and are handicapped because of amd's inability to schedule, making them work poorly enough that people can throw around (quite rationally) claims they aren't real cores... because they don't work as good as they should.