Monday, January 24th 2011
Bulldozer Shines in 3D Gaming and Rendering: AMD
Close to two weeks ago, reports surfaced about AMD claiming that its upcoming "Zambezi" 8-core desktop processor based on the company's new Bulldozer architecture is expected to perform 50% faster than Intel's Core i7 and its own Phenom II X6 processors. The slide forming the basis for the older report surfaced, and it's a little more than a cumulative performance estimate.
Slide #14 from AMD's Desktop Client Solutions presentation to its industry partners reveals that the company went ahead and provided a breakdown on which kinds of applications exactly does its new 8-core chip perform better compared to present-generation processors. The breakdown provides an interesting insight on the architecture itself. To begin with, AMD's 8-core Bulldozer "Zambezi" processor is 1.5X (50%) faster overall compared to Intel Core i7 "Bloomfield" 950, and AMD Phenom II X6 1100T. Breaking down that graph, the processor performs similar to the other chips in media applications, but features huge gains in gaming and 3D rendering, which is where most of its gains are coming from.
To put this into perspective, games and 3D graphics applications, which still favour processors with higher clock speeds with lesser number of cores/threads to processors with lesser clock speeds and higher number of cores/threads, performing well on Bulldozer indicates that AMD is concentrating on higher performance per core, in other words, higher instructions per clock (IPC). The modular design of Bulldozer, perhaps, is contributing to high inter-core bandwidth, which helps 3D games that can do with lesser number of cores.
AMD described the Zambezi-powered "Scorpius" enthusiast desktop platform to have "the best graphics features and performance". A comparative table also reminds us that apart from the radical design, Bulldozer might benefit from a vastly upgraded SIMD instruction set compared to the previous generation. Bulldozer packs SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, and AVX (Advanced Vector Extensions). With socket AM3+ motherboards already seeing the light of the day in pre-release photo shoots, AMD's new processor doesn't seem too far.
Source:
DonanimHaber
Slide #14 from AMD's Desktop Client Solutions presentation to its industry partners reveals that the company went ahead and provided a breakdown on which kinds of applications exactly does its new 8-core chip perform better compared to present-generation processors. The breakdown provides an interesting insight on the architecture itself. To begin with, AMD's 8-core Bulldozer "Zambezi" processor is 1.5X (50%) faster overall compared to Intel Core i7 "Bloomfield" 950, and AMD Phenom II X6 1100T. Breaking down that graph, the processor performs similar to the other chips in media applications, but features huge gains in gaming and 3D rendering, which is where most of its gains are coming from.
AMD described the Zambezi-powered "Scorpius" enthusiast desktop platform to have "the best graphics features and performance". A comparative table also reminds us that apart from the radical design, Bulldozer might benefit from a vastly upgraded SIMD instruction set compared to the previous generation. Bulldozer packs SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, and AVX (Advanced Vector Extensions). With socket AM3+ motherboards already seeing the light of the day in pre-release photo shoots, AMD's new processor doesn't seem too far.
122 Comments on Bulldozer Shines in 3D Gaming and Rendering: AMD
Bulldozer looks like what amd is saying to people :"dont buy intel yet please we have something better wait for us pretty please"
LGA 2011 will be in 4 quarter and even a delay may happen.
Maybe I am wrong but triple channel didn't have much of a effect when you compared socket 1366 CPU versus socket 1156. On average it will be no more that 2-3 % at best my guess.
I like how AMD is going back to its own marketting ways. "First true 8-Core Processor"... Remember when they had the first "True Quad-Core Processor"? Everyone pretty much added "that still gets it ass kicked by Intels fake Quad-Core Processors" to the end and laughed at the line...
As for 2011 plattform if P67 costs $150 at least and i72600K $330 how much the mobo and the 6 core, 8 core from intel will cost?
www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/display/20110122110646_AMD_Bulldozer_Not_Delayed_Says_Company.html
I remember hearing about this a few months ago, and I guess the source was wrong.
I'm guessing that 6 core LGA2011 will be superior to Zamezi 8 core, due to the whole module vs. core thing. When Zambezi 16 core comes out, we'll probably see some more high-end competition.
Intel's prices are high because they have no competition in those high price segments. So to answer your question in certain price ranges Intel will perform better because Intel is the only one in those price and performance ranges.
If you go lower, AMD competes nicesly, but enthusiasts want high end, and will pay Intel's prices for it until AMD can offer something competitive. And 50% faster with 100% more cores than a 2 year old product doesn't point to AMD being competitive at the current high end to me.
You can say, oh AMD wins price/performance at the lower end, but I don't see that all that often either. You can look at the $125 segment and see an i3-540 beating the x2 565BE or the i3-540 beating an x4 920 if you prefer the idea that "real men use real cores"-and still get their asses handed to them by a dual core...:laugh:
Waiting for benches :D
However, someone should kill the [AMD] from the title of the thread because we are not making these claims, some third party is.