Sunday, December 25th 2011
'Locked' AMD Zambezi Silicon Being Branded As New Phenom II Line
Besides the fact that they are carved out of the same piece of silicon by disabling components, all AMD FX series processors, from the quad-core FX-4000 series, to the eight-core FX-8000 series have one thing in common: they're all "unlocked", meaning they have an upwards-unlocked base-clock multiplier, which makes overclocking them a whole lot easier. Take that away and what do you get? A new Phenom II processor line. That's right, it is learned that AMD has a new line of Phenom II processors, eight-core for now, that are being carved out of the 32 nm Zambezi silicon.
Intuitively branded within the new Phenom II X8 and existing Phenom II X6 markers, these chips feature relatively lower clock speeds, meaning they will be priced low, competitive with Intel's sub-$200 Core i3 and Core i5 processors. AMD will also tinker with Zambezi's caches. The new chips came to light when some motherboard manufacturers leaked them on CPU support lists of certain motherboards, on their websites. For now we're getting to hear about two eight-core models, the 2.40 GHz Phenom II X8 2420, and 3.00 GHz Phenom II X8 3020; and two six-core models, the 2.50 GHz Phenom II X6 2520, and 2.80 GHz Phenom II X6 2820. Relevant details are tabled below. It beats us why AMD didn't take the opportunity (new silicon) to label these "Phenom III".
Source:
Inpai.com.cn
Intuitively branded within the new Phenom II X8 and existing Phenom II X6 markers, these chips feature relatively lower clock speeds, meaning they will be priced low, competitive with Intel's sub-$200 Core i3 and Core i5 processors. AMD will also tinker with Zambezi's caches. The new chips came to light when some motherboard manufacturers leaked them on CPU support lists of certain motherboards, on their websites. For now we're getting to hear about two eight-core models, the 2.40 GHz Phenom II X8 2420, and 3.00 GHz Phenom II X8 3020; and two six-core models, the 2.50 GHz Phenom II X6 2520, and 2.80 GHz Phenom II X6 2820. Relevant details are tabled below. It beats us why AMD didn't take the opportunity (new silicon) to label these "Phenom III".
64 Comments on 'Locked' AMD Zambezi Silicon Being Branded As New Phenom II Line
AMD Athlon II X4 631 Llano 2.6GHz Socket FM1 100W ...
and I swear they said there was ~<7% IPC Increase....with K12
So these locked CPUs, are they like the old locked ones, where the multiplier is locked, but the Bclk is not? Or are both locked like on Intel's locked CPUs?
I think that this is all part of a brilliant strategy to lower expectations.
Piledriver has two versions called Viperfish(Opteron and FX) and Trinity(A10, A8, A6, A4, and E2)
Athlon, Phenom, and Sempron are dead names after next year. (Athlon will only exist in OEM sector)
This better not be true, why on earth would AMD go back into calling CPU's Phenom ?
This is a little old but B2.G and B3 is both considered some what fixed
B2.G like just came out and B3 is within two months
Viperfish -> Light or Faster or Deeper pipeline(I'm just leaning on faster on this one, there is no sign of them increasing the stage pipeline in the K15hSOG or using optical pins)
Trinity is certain but Viperfish isn't so certain(It might be called something else but the GCC update for K15.1 said Viperfish+Trinity New ISA support)
It's why when you go to the store and buy something that costs pennies to produce they charge you £2 for it :laugh:
The cost to produce a FX-4100, FX-6100, FX-8100(OEM), FX-8120, FX-8150 are all the same but the quality of silicon is different do which is not stable
FX-4100 -> $129.99
FX-6100 -> $179.99
FX-8100 -> $199.99
FX-8120 -> $219.99
FX-8150 -> $245.99
All of them use the same die but you usually are going to get more bad yields than good yields
More Yield, Less Quality*
v
Less Yield, More Quality*
The same goes for the i7 3930K and the i7 3960X
Intel is going to be making alot more i7 3930Ks than i7 3960Xs because the i7 3930K requires less effort for the process to achieve the standpoints making more yields
*Not always the case majority of the time the higher end stuff can have less quality than the lower end stuff do to leakage with high clocks but Quality can also be used to say how much features are enabled....as well(4 Cores with half the possible L1 and L2 caches enabled vs 8 cores with all the L1 and L2 caches enabled)
1) The processor number does not reflect the number of cores
2)The Phenom 2 name does not reflect the new instructions...
They should have used the Duron name to properly represent their market position...
As soon as APM is shut off in the bios ( stops the cpu down-clocking under load)
It's not all that bad, IPC is 10% lower than phenom II* but bulldozer can potentially clock 20% higher.
I only really get crap results in things that use older code (for example super pi, my phenom x6 done a lot better in that)
How ever in all the games I have I've had no performance loss :toast:
* 4.4ghz BD has similar IPC to 4ghz Phenom.
4.4ghz is REAL easy on BD though, the fx8150 is a waste of time, but the price difference between 1100t and fx8120 is justified IMO.
Personally, I haven't seen many applications using more than 4 cores.
So when these 4 threaded applications start running on CPU 0,1,2,3 of bulldozer, they are not running optimally, as 0 and 1 are from the same module, 2 and 3 are from the 2nd module. 3rd and 4th modules aren't being used. The optimally way of running these applications/games is setting afinity to cpu 0, 2, 4, 6
Unless they use 8 threads.
It what the 2 posters above me post say. Bulldozer is new, give it some time to mature and it should perform even better. Recommending a Phenom II over a FX is bad advice imo. Its good to see FX selling very good. AMD can't meet demand, this should further motivate AMD to make it even better with future Piledriver.
Real world Benchmarks, FX does well enough as long Price is right.
www.techspot.com/review/452-amd-bulldozer-fx-cpus/page7.html
This is where you say "Techspot cant be trusted. That is just 1 website". :roll:
Every review going gave it a thumbs down and the forum threads around the internet discussing this lemon are legion. In particular, it's worth quoting the very last sentence from the review by bit-tech: "Turns out we were right: the FX-8150 is a stinker." Ouch. The best thing going for this processor is its unlocked multiplier and excellent overclockability – records have been set due to this and is a fair win for the product, if niche in scope. 6 core and 4 core variants are also on sale.
www.techpowerup.com/157414/Christmas-Special-The-PC-Technology-of-2011.html
It turns out that the only one who may benefit from the upcoming migration from Phenom II to the new FX family is AMD. Bulldozer microarchitecture allows the company to stop using old manufacturing process for their semiconductor dies and move on to the new cores with lower production cost. However, the end users won’t win in this situation. FX CPUs that are coming to replace the good old Phenom II processors are not faster or cheaper than their predecessors. Therefore, until processors on new Piledriver microarchitecture come out, the new FX are of no real interest to AMD fans and Phenom II owners. FX CPUs are also hardly appealing for the new systems: Intel’s Core i5 and Core i3 processors can offer better combination of price and performance in a wide range of tasks with only a few exceptions such as video transcoding in x264 codec and selected 3D rendering applications.
So, we can’t recommend getting involved with the new FX CPUs from AMD at least until they revise their pricing. And even though there are claims that desktop Bulldozer processors are selling pretty well, we can’t imagine who could really be investing their hard-earned cash into these products.
www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/amd-fx-8120-6100-4100_10.html#sect0
:nutkick: