The April Fool's Day Bulldozer Presentation

me2, i dont expect bulldozer to be an intel crusher, intel has seriously been making sure they stay ahead of amd since core2, but i would love to see a drastic drop in tdp and a huge spike in ipc, i wanna see a 45watt quad @ 3.0ghz : )

AMD seem to be betting everything on multithreaded applications, hoping to be able to fit twice as many cores into a die as Intel, but readily conceding the lowly threaded applications to Intel.

I suspect they have taken this approach mainly to try and shore up their position in the server market, and will try and stress that AMD are still a good choice on desktop because they will be fast enough on lowly threaded apps, and will shine on highly threaded apps like video encoding.

However, even if Bulldozer proves to be a more compelling processor than Sandy Bridge, they face the prospect of having to deal with Intel's 22nm refresh of Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge.

Him 'acting' freaked out could have been part of the 'fooling'. *shrug I'm curious as well.

I have high hopes for BD, if there is more IPC increase rather than cores it'll be my next system. Assuming intel doesn't hold the price/performance at the time.

1 module != 2 smaller cores and it's inaccurate to say such. It's much more accurate to compare it to Hyperthreading than saying a module is its own dual-core. AMD is just going a step further than Intel has (thus far).

Also, don't forget, AMD's "smaller cores" are going from 3-way int to 4-way int, which should bring a healthy performance increase. The Floating point unit is doubling, also (256-bit or 2 128-bit), so from 4-core to 4-module you gain ~double theoretical FP and ~2.6 times the theoretical integer power.

And the actual "core" of processors is pretty small, nowadays. Cache, IO, and the Uncore take up a huge portion of the CPU die. I think they're making a pretty smart move putting in that extra processing power. Kind of like brute force in an elegant way.

But if JF was just playing along, he would have posted a "gotcha" the day after right? Seriously his post asking AMDZone to take down the bogus BD review that quoted him seemed pretty sincere, as well as desperate. However I see that he posted a blog over on AMD.com 3 days ago, so I guess he didn't lose his job over the prank.

April Fool.

That is fair enough, but when AMD's official marketing material refers to a Bulldozer module as consisting of two cores, then it takes some doing to dispute that, as it is actually in their interest to try and pass a module off as being only one core.

Okay

Yes, I was roaring with laughter when I read that.

It looks like that idiot didn't realise that he would get world wide publicity as the world's worst overclocker, because his pathetic attempts were reported on many forums around the world.

Now he has retreated into the World of Warcraft and who knows if he will ever be seen again. Even his cohorts on AMDZone express serious concern for his state of mind.

I doubt that he would know the difference between his elbow and his arse.

I think his problems as ZootyGay started when he began insane Anti-American rants over in their "political" forum and as you can well imagine, those rants made as much sense as his rants against Intel.

It actually looks pretty reasonable to me. If AMD doesn't come out with that kind of power in their new chips, I will be disappointed.

Hmm, now that I didn't know. IMO, WOW is like crack to certain people, such as my wife's nephew. He is on his Mac here in my basement morning, noon & night. If he didn't have to eat, poop & go to school, I'm sure he'd be playing 24/7 until he died in his seat, like that Korean gamer last summer.

I've been known to skip a few projects around the house in favor of playing Dragon Age , but not to that extent..

Keeping in mind these are supposedly totally fake performance figures, but the Zambesi Bulldozer models are 8 core/4 modules and Interlagos is a 16core/8 module.

IIRC TH's gulftown review, crysis doesn't take advantage of more than 4 cores. You can see the architecture is much more powerfull than phenom II's stars archicetchture with that big jump in performance. You have to wonder what GPU or how many of them they are using to get those numbers.

I don't know if this can be trusted though. It seems a bit early to even have engineering samples ready. Zambelzi should be out Q1 2011, but the other chips should be even later, around Q2 of Q3.

they just xfired four overclocked HD6890

In fairness to AMD, that claim applied to server processors as I recall and assumed they reached their targeted release date, and clock speeds. They did neither. If they had, that 40% wouldn't have been too far off.

They were planning on 3GHZ launch in the summer of '07 They were more than a year and a half late. Big big difference.

So I think AMD meeting their scheduled performance and launch shedule is more important than worrying about their marketing talk.