AMD Bulldozer Threading Hotfix Pulled

[trickson]

Originally Posted by Damn_Smooth

What the hell are you talking about? If there was a problem with the scheduling on an Intel Chip you can bet your last dollar that they would issue a patch to fix it. Probably a lot sooner than this.

Besides, if you think this patch is going to turn BD into an SB killer, I have a bridge in London that I'll sell you for cheap.

But this in not the case pall . It seems like BD is not doing so well in the first place and if YOU need a HOT FIX then just how good is that CPU to start with ? I have never seen one HOT FIX for Intel CPU's ! Why is it AMD needs a driver so windows will schedule ? I just do not get it .

[Damn_Smooth]

Originally Posted by trickson

But this in not the case pall . It seems like BD is not doing so well in the first place and if YOU need a HOT FIX then just how good is that CPU to start with ? I have never seen one HOT FIX for Intel CPU's ! Why is it AMD needs a driver so windows will schedule ? I just do not get it .

AMD fucked up. What's not to get? I don't get why this is bothering you so bad, it's not like it's effecting you in any way.

[trickson]

Originally Posted by Damn_Smooth

AMD fucked up. What's not to get? I don't get why this is bothering you so bad, it's not like it's effecting you in any way.

Sure it does . It is like this one person said an I will Quote them .

What's worse than designing a CPU that performs poorly in Windows and not having a plan in place after said product was delayed for YEARS to get that part of Windows updated?

Releasing half of the solution prematurely, getting the hopes and dreams of the 5 people who bought into your CPU that could get no good reviews, then yanking those hopes away with no official remarks of any kind announced, rumors and hearsay suggesting that the "real" update will come later.

The launch of Bulldozer has been such an insane catastrophe from before Day 1, it's hard to imagine AMD ever doing worse at a product launch again. I didn't think they could beat their Phenom bug launch, but wow, they sure did prove me wrong. It just takes work across every division inside AMD to make a reality!

[JustaTinkerer]

LOL, I care little for my analogies, I was making fun reading.
As the joker would say "why so serious".

Let me tell you how it is.
Intel dont need help.....you getting that?
AMD didnt really need it until windows 7 scheduling.

And I quote

"Windows 7 doesn’t understand Bulldozer’s resource allocation very well. Windows 7 “sees” eight independent CPU cores, despite the fact that each module shares scheduling and execution resources."
You starting to see the problem?

[trickson]

Originally Posted by JustaTinkerer

LOL, I care little for my analogies, I was making fun reading.
As the joker would say "why so serious".

Let me tell you how it is.
Intel dont need help.....you getting that?
AMD didnt really need it until windows 7 scheduling.

And I quote

"Windows 7 doesn’t understand Bulldozer’s resource allocation very well. Windows 7 “sees” eight independent CPU cores, despite the fact that each module shares scheduling and execution resources."
You starting to see the problem?

Yes I see the problem . AMD .

[blibba]

It's not that AMD are getting help and Intel aren't.

It's that Windows 7 currently knows perfectly well how to use Intel CPUs, but doesn't know how to use Bulldozer CPUs. It can end up sending two threads to the same module when other modules are available, resulting in performance drops most noticeable in software optimised for dual core CPUs.

[Damn_Smooth]

Originally Posted by trickson

Sure it does . It is like this one person said an I will Quote them .

So how does that effect you? Did you buy the chip? All of the magic in the world isn't going to change BD in to an SB killer, but if it makes the chip run the way it's supposed to, I see no reason why you care.

You are basically bitching because Intel didn't fuck up.

[JustaTinkerer]

Originally Posted by blibba

It's not that AMD are getting help and Intel aren't.

It's that Windows 7 currently knows perfectly well how to use Intel CPUs, but doesn't know how to use Bulldozer CPUs. It can end up sending two threads to the same module when other modules are available, resulting in performance drops most noticeable in software optimised for dual core CPUs.

On the money but dont bite like me, hes trolling for a argument.

I need to stop before I get in to it......run blibba.... run

[trickson]

Originally Posted by blibba

It's not that AMD are getting help and Intel aren't.

It's that Windows 7 currently knows perfectly well how to use Intel CPUs, but doesn't know how to use Bulldozer CPUs. It can end up sending two threads to the same module when other modules are available, resulting in performance drops most noticeable in software optimised for dual core CPUs.

Here is the real problem as I see it . AMD released the chip they must have known this well maybe not as they did not know how many transistors were on the blood thing to start with . AMD is at fault here NOT Microsoft so how is it there problem ? I just think AMD should be giving fully tested fully functioning chips from the start ! Not some thing like they have been giving for the last 5 years . Hot fix this hot fix that . Bug this bug that . It makes me wonder about the quality of there product as a consumer why would I want some POS that needs so much just to work ?

[trickson]

Originally Posted by Damn_Smooth

So how does that effect you? Did you buy the chip? All of the magic in the world isn't going to change BD in to an SB killer, but if it makes the chip run the way it's supposed to, I see no reason why you care.

You are basically bitching because Intel didn't fuck up.

Thing is I wanted TO ! I wanted this chip ! Yes I got a MB now for it but what use is that if this chip sucks so much ?

[JustaTinkerer]

Originally Posted by trickson

Thing is I wanted TO ! I wanted this chip ! Yes I got a MB now for it but what use is that if this chip sucks so much ?

Ah now anger at projected results I understand. Not AMDs fault you bought the board.

[Damn_Smooth]

Originally Posted by trickson

Thing is I wanted TO ! I wanted this chip ! Yes I got a MB now for it but what use is that if this chip sucks so much ?

I have a board for it too. It still runs the Phenoms fine. Who knows? Maybe PD will come out and be the best thing since sliced bread. I highly doubt it and I will have moved on to Ivy by then, but you never can tell. Besides, you bought the board on your own just like I did, we have nobody to blame but ourselves.

[trickson]

Originally Posted by Damn_Smooth

I have a board for it too. It still runs the Phenoms fine. Who knows? Maybe PD will come out and be the best thing since sliced bread. I highly doubt it and I will have moved on to Ivy by then, but you never can tell. Besides, you bought the board on your own just like I did, we have nobody to blame but ourselves.

Yeah since when should AMD think of the consumer . Well I am done with AMD and with this thread as I see it AMD did do this they are to blame . Have a nice day .

[TRWOV]

Originally Posted by trickson

Sure does seem a bit one sided when AMD gets the performance enhancements and Intel get shit ! I do not think AMD is really that far behind at all ! AMD'S BD is a very fast chip but what it lacks is some performance enhancements that only are going to apply to AMD Chips NOT TO Intel's Chips ? That to me is a bit f'ed up ! AMD has some fast CPU's and now they get a enhancement were as Intel is left in the dust ?

Intel's HT and Athlon X2 received a hotfix too back when they were new, if I recall correctly.

[linoliveira]

All i see here is hate... cmon... srly guys? It's just an hotfix, not the end of the world.

Intel fanboys playing the victim game and saying shit here and there... srly? LOL! Buldozer will not outperform your chip, and W7 is optimized for SMT (intel design), so i don't see the point.
All i see in this news post is a benefict for AMD owners that MS will be releasing for W7 (wich all of us should be happy, not bashing each other)

Every new tech needs adoption, if no one ever optimizes things for new tech, we would still have single threaded apps and single-core CPU's worth a shit. Windows is optimized for SMT and now Buldozer brings up CMT, i don't see why not optimize it if they can.

[lashton]

m,y phenom II X4 kicks a 17-2600K rig in BF3 and thats all i play sop CPU means dick shit in games!

[xenocide]

Originally Posted by blibba

It's that Windows 7 currently knows perfectly well how to use Intel CPUs, but doesn't know how to use Bulldozer CPUs. It can end up sending two threads to the same module when other modules are available, resulting in performance drops most noticeable in software optimised for dual core CPUs.

Do you know why this is? Because Modules = CORES. AMD is marketting their CPU's deceptively. The reason Windows 7 sees each Modules as 2 seperate cores, is because that's how AMD wanted it. It's not Microsoft's fault AMD made a CPU that was poorly optimized. Intel CPU's don't accidentally send multiple threads through each core when HTing is present to my knowledge.

The shared resource design is fundamentally flawed. If BD is allowed to be marketted as an 8-Core CPU, then the i7-2600k should be as well.

Originally Posted by TRWOV

Intel's HT and Athlon X2 received a hotfix too back when they were new, if I recall correctly.

Not sure about HTing, but I know the Athlon X2's had a Hot Fix from AMD because the chips internal schedulers were setup incorrectly for Windows. Basically since that was on a hardware level, the aptch reconfigured Windows to read the threads differently.

Originally Posted by lashton

m,y phenom II X4 kicks a 17-2600K rig in BF3 and thats all i play sop CPU means dick shit in games!

Wow, I'm sold. Wait... no... that's retarded. If you are comparing a Phenom II X4 with a GTX580 to a i7-2600k with a 520GT, of course you're going to see the Penom II X4 perform better, with equal graphics cards, the i7 will beat the Phenom II pretty handily. And saying the CPU "means dick shit in games" proves that you have no fucking clue what you're talking about.

[ensabrenoir]

I read these bulldozer threads for the sheer comedy.... However do understand the frustration/hope of those who bought the chip. Sad part is they'll probably get it optimized 2 days before piledrivers launch.

[seronx]

Originally Posted by xenocide

Do you know why this is? Because Modules = CORES. AMD is marketting their CPU's deceptively. The reason Windows 7 sees each Modules as 2 seperate cores, is because that's how AMD wanted it. It's not Microsoft's fault AMD made a CPU that was poorly optimized. Intel CPU's don't accidentally send multiple threads through each core when HTing is present to my knowledge.

Originally Posted by abinstein

You CLAIM a core is <whatever you claimed> but unfortunately what you claimed is not true.

What has always been the meaning of a "core" is the circuit used for the management of a thread and its memory context. This usually includes the datapath, control, and bus. This usually excludes the caches and accelerators (incl. FPU).

To be more precise, a processor can be partitioned into the following functional units: data cache, instruction data, { control unit, instruction bus, data bus, (integer) datapath } and (floating point) accelerator datapath. Those inside the {} above form a "core". You may ask: why is integer datapath special? Because any process (thread + memory context) is *always* managed by the integer datapath. Any branch instruction, ILP, OOO, speculation, is performed by the integer datapath.

So the question to ask is how many sets of the {} above does a Bulldozer module have? The answer is 2. There are two cores. This has nothing to do with marketing. It's a technical definition.

Now, you don't need to like this definition. You can be bone headed enough to insist on your own definition of core. That is fine. Just like you can insist 1+1=1. Perhaps you are right in an alternative naming convention (if `+' means the logic-or to you), but you should at least understand that a Bulldozer module is said to have "two cores" for very with sound technical reasons.

Hmmmm, I'll just post this every time people do "that."

[Iciclebar]

I know you guys like to get all riled up and say how its never happened and amd this and intel that and so on and so forth.

To be honest it happens every time someone changes something in a way not expected. Sometimes it just needs software changes. Look at the Pentium 3 and the Pentium 4. When the p4 came out it performed more slowly than the p3 in most workloads unless you made use of SSE2 instructions. Once you did it flattened it. The p3-S 1.4 chip outperformed the p4 at some workloads until the p4 reached almost 2 ghz. This is an example of the software being "patched" or "coded to take advantage of the strengths of an architecture".

With HT there were issues when it first came out. The system would assign high priority threads to the logical core and the chip would stall out the logical core when it should have been running that thread. The system would sit in a "Waiting" period, sometimes for an actual noticeable amount of times if you had a poorly written .net program where the UI is tied into execution code or something of that nature, when this happened you could actually tell the program locked up momentarily. The patch helped aleviate this problem.

Athlon x2 had issues. A bigger issue was the first phenom TLB bug, this had fixes but the performance suffered. Phenom also had issues with the independant core clocking feature. Vista was pushing priority threads onto cores that had clocked down to 200mhz. There was a noticeable lag when you had to clock the cores up to full speed on a system critical thread.

TLDR
Change can be good but it also causes issues. If Windows is updated to the point where it can properly address bulldozers cores then this method is available to not only AMD but intel is well if they want to split cores down the middle instead of the 70/30 or 80/20 split hyper threading has now. This also paves the way for an OS aware of specialized cores. Lets say Intel or AMD actually wants to offload general computing functions to the GPU sections of their chips and the OS can do it automatically instead of having to need code compiled to do it in the first place?

[xenocide]

Originally Posted by seronx

Hmmmm, I'll just post this every time people do "that."

By most definitions they are independent cores, but they don't behave like them. The fact is AMD has bashed Intel in the past for using the term when they didn't think it was 100% accurate, so I reserve the right to do the same. You can swear up and down that BD is an 8-Core CPU, but it seems to take a per-thread performance hit from the shared resource design, just as HTing in Intel CPU's causes a per-thread performance hit.

[Iciclebar]

AMD's "cores" are much closer to a complete cpu core than a hyperthreaded core is. Sure if it walks like a duck quacks like a duck and so on...

Hyperthreading was designed to maximize cpu usage by always being able to feed the execution units. Instead of waiting to fully load up a new thread. Being able to switch immediately has its advantages. In the end however its a technology designed to feed a single "core". This is why I would consider SB i7 a quad instead of an 8 core chip.

In AMD's case its more like 2 cores joined at the hip, they share some resources but in actuality have 2 complete functioning pipelines and are able to complete certain operations without accessing the other "core". In intel's design unless theyve changed it recently you cant process the logical thread directly.

If Intel and AMD were monsters Intel would be a guy with 4 arms. AMD would be a guy with 4 arms, 2 heads and 1 head is disagreeing with the other one about what they should be holding onto.

[seronx]

Originally Posted by xenocide

By most definitions they are independent cores, but they don't behave like them.

They do behave like two individual cores.

Originally Posted by xenocide

You can swear up and down that BD is an 8-Core CPU, but it seems to take a per-thread performance hit from the shared resource design, just as HTing in Intel CPU's causes a per-thread performance hit.

Not related...

Performance doesn't equal Core Amount

CPU A:
1 control unit, 512bit instruction bus, 512bit data bus, 512bit (integer) datapath with a 1024bit FPU on die in the core space
CPU B:
8 control units, 8 64bit instruction buses, 8 64bit data buses, 8 64bit integer data paths each of the 8 cores has one 128bit FPU on die in eight of the core spaces

In a well optimized benchmark for CPU A and CPU B..(It is SMP ready and CMP ready)
CPU A scores 1,000 pts
CPU B scores 1,000 pts

Following your definition of what a core is
CPU A is an eight core and CPU B is a single core

[JustaTinkerer]

Originally Posted by xenocide

By most definitions they are independent cores, but they don't behave like them. The fact is AMD has bashed Intel in the past for using the term when they didn't think it was 100% accurate, so I reserve the right to do the same. You can swear up and down that BD is an 8-Core CPU, but it seems to take a per-thread performance hit from the shared resource design, just as HTing in Intel CPU's causes a per-thread performance hit.

2 cores (modules) sharing a single scheduler is the problem, the scheduler in windows 7 doesn't see it this way.

it see's HT'ing fine but cant see two SMT threads (in which each thread shares most of the hardware resources with the other thread).

[seronx]

Originally Posted by JustaTinkerer

2 cores (modules) sharing a single scheduler is the problem, the scheduler in windows 7 doesn't see it this way.

I don't see where a single scheduler is being shared in relation to the cores....