AMD roadmap

AMD's roadmaps are always accurate *sarcasm*

AMD could be onto something with the Athlon II's in the mainstream. The discovery that cache is somewhat not worth the premium should really allow for extremely cheap quad cores, which should also be good on power draw and heat.

AMD will make these so cheap that maintream buyers and OEM's cannot resist. That is the plan for 2010.

What I've read, anywhere from 0 to 20% performance penalty with no L3 cache, but that's compared to the P2 which has it's L3 clocked much slower than the remainder of the CPU, right?

Anyway, if the margins are low on these, selling a lot of them and fewer P2s would hurt AMD's bottom line.

Zambezi = Bulldozer.

Well this diagram does talk about cpu architectures and all but what i'm really interested in is die shrinks. AMD seems to be quite a bit behind Intel in moving to 32nm

Sorry I actually meant Llano.

cant wait for thuban, wish they made it l3 cachless and added a ddr2 controller

Aagh! i cant wait for some more information on bulldozer

And wait a minute- does more cache mean higher IPC?

cache does mean higher ipc because the cpu has data stored on the chip that might be in ram, also, l3 allows all the cores to "copy off each-other's papers" but amd does not make full use of l3 like intel does, thats why athlon x4 620 and phenom x4 810 are pretty much matched, but if you took away l3 from an i5 or i7 the perf diff will be much more. if amd can fully utilise the l3 correctly perf will b much higher

amds six core is 45nm, so they might just be able to launch before gulftown, but once gulftown is released, thuban will be crushed and i can buy a hexacore for under $200

intel has said that core i9 will adhere to the same 130w tdp,

if i can get this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6819103689
into my am3 mobo for under $200 gulftown better come with a pot of gold, or i aint buyin. even if they get to 3.0+ ghz

Yep. Global Foundries wont be ready with 32nm until the 2nd half of 2010, but that's because AMD won't be switching until then either. Bulldozer will be in production Q4 2010 for sale Q1 2011.

If reports are true, global foundries 32nm is really, really good. Claims of up to 50% better are being made, because of the unique 'gate first' approach.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other [...] ology.html

2010 will be pretty rough for AMD but no worse than 2008 was.

Remember that guy who posted the blog "The card that killed the Dragon"? Looks like he wasn't very accurate, since HD5000 has nothing to do with Dragon.

That's very true. Thanks for pointing that one out. I was wondering what the colors were....

Well not necessarily so.

If the L3 cache has very highe latency then no real opportunity for IPC can be realised - Look at a comparison between Phenom I and Phenom II (with a cut down cache).

Even the new Athlons have better IPC on most tasks than Phenom I.

Why?

Slower memry controller.
Slower L1, L2, and particularly L3 cache.

I argue the speed of the cache is more important and the prefetch system - hence Intel have a real advantage.

Look at core2 for example, which although hamstrung by a slow FSB compared to HT still beats Phenom II and the i7 in a number of areas because the L1 and L2 cache are blisteringly fast.

It all boils down to Intel's superior transistor design on the cache circuits.

Now Paul can I have a few ES chippies posted my way ... PM me about Pat's replacement will ya ?