Quote:
Originally Posted by xenocide
Intel was well on it's way to a hard switch to 64-bit computing, which would have meant around the time the AMD Athlon 64's came out, everyone would make the jump to 64-bit. It was awesome that AMD got x86-64 working for the sake of backwards compatability, but it's also the reason to this day we're still stuck with 32-bit programs when most of us have 64-bit computers.
AMD definitely was on the right path with High IPC, but with Bulldozer they decided to go all Netburst and start using lower IPC with substantially higher clocks. Worked well for Intel back then right?
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no amd didnt go "low IPC"
they just decided to not only focus on ipc but also get more efficient execution, in theory a bulldozer module has 25% more compute capabilities than a phenom II core, but due to improper tuning and high latencies it takes a good 30-40% hit which puts its per core ipc behind phenom II, but if things were to work out perfect they would be years ahead, and im sure thats what amd thot aswell when they tested on simulated machines
there is no point for amd to go against intel in the "fat cores" with high IPC battle because if amd does so it will always be behind due to intel having more money which allows it to stay ahead in fabrication process, amd will have to take a more efficient architecture approach to get anywhere and thats where cores with shared resources came from(bulldozer was supposed to share the hardware that isnt always used by the core, and share it between 2 cores, and while integer cores would be crunching data in their cycle, the shared resources would be feeding the second core ) , and i think bulldozer was a good move in theory, just had very bad execution, what piledriver is turning out to be was supposed 2 be bulldozer. also there is nothing fundamentally wrong with bulldozer, they can add more decoders and fpu units to it and increase the modules ipc and with fine tuning sharing will have no affect to performance wat so ever, but it wasnt designed that way because bulldozer was meant to be for 45nm so adding more hardware would only make the modules too big
now if bulldozer was to compete with nehelem it would be seen as a much better cpu, but SB was the problem
remember bulldozer was years late to market