News AMD squares up to Core i7 Sandy Bridge

Of course it is & of course they can.
But given AMD's track record of the last couple of years they don't look like aiming for the performance crown, do they? Their main objective seems to be to get the very competitive & lucrative low to mid segment under control.

 

I might be wrong but was under the impression that Bulldozer was meant to change that, being their first entirely new architecture, containing new technologies, such as their first implementation of hyper-threading which is meant to be a lot stronger than Intels and the rebirth of the FX prefix.

I'm interested to see what will be on offer.

I for one will be glad to see the back of the old Athlon architecture, it was great in its day, but is really showing its age.

I'm hoping that the absolute top end Intel chips will remain on top, but in almost every other area we're going to see a good competition.

 

Since everyone is reminising about the alledged good old days of when AMD had a decent product and then speculating that Bulldozer will take back the crown from the evil empire.

I may as well add my 2 pence.

Nothing in this topic or comments can be listed as FACT.

I SPECULATE that this release is from AMD themselves to wet the appetite of their blinkered fan base.

So with the release of this "leaked" document, it looks like AMD will now shut themselves out of the high end market with no product to go up against Intel's LGA2011.

As enthusiasts, doesn't that worry you all? No competition for the products we all aspire to own.

 

I can say the same sentence with a different outcome:

Not worried. I have a AMD Phenom II x4 and its MORE then enough for me. I havent lookt at Intel since a decade...

 

I'd like to see AMD compete but it's unlikely to happen if There new high end CPU comes close to a i7950 I'll be surprised. They certainly won't compete in high end or enthusiast so no compete for top end chips again

AMD need to consider there ideas, make some top end CPUs that cost like old fx range whilst still doing this bargain basement stuff or drop out of even atempting it and focusing on the mid range

As for price / performance part of me says who cares I've never looked at the mid range parts since I started building myself, don't really see that changing

 

I'll believe it when I see a real-world-test.
(Preferrably here on Bit)
It would be great if it turns out this way though. And I'd buy it (unless I've just bought an i5)

 

I hope AMD sees sense. I don't care if Intel will give me me 100fps and AMD 101fps. I'm sure both manufacturers will have chips that are 'more than enough' for everyday use.

I'm fed up with having to buy a new mobo/cpu/ram combo when I just want one of the above and particularly with Intel's 'one socket a year' method at the moment. On the flip side, I do hope AMD at least get close to Intel in terms of performance purely to drive prices down. The prices that Intel are setting these days are ridiculous, but that's exactly what I'd be doing if I had no competition.

Will Bulldozer be dual or triple channel memory?

 

+1 thanks for saving me the response, yours is better.

 

Actually ever since then, AMD have created their own cycle of misleading marketing by using their own ratings.

 

FINALLY! AMD WILL TAKE THE FIGHT TO INTEL Like the good old days of 2000-2003 when AMD Ruled

Lets hope AMD's next genration 8 Core CPU bench marks blows away Intel Sandy Bridge Quad & Hex core CPU's. It has been a long time and AMD fans are excited to see the under dog becomming Top Dog once again!

 

Nevermind, iPhone post fail

 

For example? I'd honestly like to hear some examples, as I've followed the technology on both sides pretty closely and I've not ever felt that AMD was being “misleading” with their rating system. If I did I'd be one of the first to bleat about it.

You seem to be suggesting that it was misleading that AMD innovated? Or that they had years of having higher performing chips than Intel around the time they introduced their own rating system.

That said a company isn't your friend, you don't need to emotively defend them, a brand is just a brand, a company doesn't care about you, only sucking money out of your wallet, they'll do this through means foul or fair. This is something that I have no qualms admitting to myself, I try to be a well informed purchaser that is all, brand loyalty is to me, ridiculous.

All I was saying was give credit where its due, AMD have in the past, several times, given Intel a damn good hiding, they beat them to break the X86 1Ghz barrier, they then started innovating pretty heavily. The Athlon and Athlon XP were excellent chips which beat Intel's rival chips substantially clock for clock. Hence the need for a rating system in the first place, if in 9/10 benchmarks you're beating a 3Ghz P4 with a 1.8Ghz Athlon XP you need to make people aware of this this is why the rating system was introduced, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to look at reviews of the chip from multiple sources and see their rating was more or less accurate.

They then had the first 64 bit processors, when Intel was stating that home users don't need 64 bit (you could still be limited to 4gig of ram) and developed AMD64, which Intel had to copy essentially in order to compete.

Then AMD had the first true duel and quad cores, whilst Intel was still gluing cores together in a terribly inefficient manner.

Having the memory controller on the die and hypertransport rather than the FSB were good innovations we all as enthusiasts benefit from.

That said perhaps my memory just stretches further back than most, I remember the Athlon FX line resiliently holding on to the top performance crown for a number of years. In benchmarks not ratings, I remember CustomPC rewarding the Athlon FX line several times.

That said Intel came back strong, and has been consistently pushing the boundaries. Their latest chips are awesome, and they have been consistently releasing excellent chips for years now. They got woken from their slumber when AMD started taking not only a substantial amount of desktop market share but also server marketshare and have come out punching with each revision since they dropped Netburst and went back to square one.

That doesn't mean that AMD CPUs haven't been good, they have been, just not as strong at all in the upper end of the market. But everything they've released for many a year has been built upon and variations of the original Athlon architecture, and Bulldozer is their first completely new architecture. It'll be exciting to see what it brings to the table, from what I've seen thus far they're innovating again and I for one hope they give Intel a run for its money again, simply because competition means better products and lower prices.

I'm sorry if I read your reply in a manner you didn't intend, it seemed to me that you were defending your favoured brand rather than countering my statement.

 

Interestingly though, LGA 2011 will be out & competing with the 2600K won't be competing for the performance crown but for leadership in the *tadaaa* mid-market segment... again.

 

If you are looking at power efficiency, than Atoms still beat Zacate/Ontario, by a small amount, but Atom is also almost 2 years older for its basic design than Zacate/Ontario. Now if you are going for a chip to put in something like a netbook or HTPC, I'd go Zacate/Ontario, but if I wanted a low power server...Atom is the way I'd go (better processing efficiency). Zacate/Ontario because of the >>> GPU on die, Atom because it has better processing efficiency (even if not quite as fast as the E350).

Llano might hold the low end, but it doesn't look like it is going to compete against anything other than dual core SB at best (and that is quad core Llano vs dual core SB). Llano is nothing other than current K10.5 architecture + a GPU on die. That is nice for integrated system builders, and great for lower end systems where you want power and cost savings from not needing a discrete GPU...but it isn't going to catch much of the mid market unless it has a much, much better GPU on die than it looks like it is going to have (it is at best going to catch casual gamers, people's grand parents, and people who surf the web and do their taxes on their home computer).

Bulldozer...well I can hope, but if AMD is stacking up an 8 core chip to be the winner over a 4 core...well, it just doesn't sound like the architecture is that advanced. Better than K10.5 maybe, but SB isn't Intel's high end, SB EX is going to be. Now I'll grant you AMD hasn't really been trying to compete against Intels higher end chips in a long time (or at least I hope they haven't been)...but it deffinitely gives Intel a certain amount of prestiage, and captures a lot of the server market as well.

Unless bulldozer manages a miracle and can at least out perform Intel on power consumption vs processing power (I highly doubt that), or radically under cut them on price, I just don't see Bulldozer being a winner. I want them to be able to, I like healthy competition (consumer wins)...but I just have to repeat my stance that I don't see AMD taking the lead in this cycle, and probably not the next one as Ivy bridge isn't all that far away (didn't SB just show up???)

Course I'd love to see AMD come out with some cheap low power chips, A la the Sempron and e series. Give me some 20-35w TDP dual to quad core chips for under $100 and I'll be a happy, happy man building a new low power server (course I just built a Sempron 140 server a few weeks ago, but hey, I can dream/plan ahead).

 

No need to apologise at all. My response was pretty sceptical of your original statement so it me that needs to say sorry. As we have many cases of all the brand's marketing aimed to favour themselves rather than the competition. However, in the real world, we make the comparisons and then the informed decision to buy the most appropriate product or component for our needs.

The problem for AMD is that they have promised quite a bit in recent years and then not really delivered. As a company, any short term gains they have made against their competition have not really been built upon to progress further and be that overall leader in the ever important performance in any budget.

Case in point are the Bit-Tech recommendations have not seen an AMD CPU in any of the builds for some time. Additionally, the GPU market where they really did have a head start with the current generations have not gone on dominate by any margin at all, if any.

The fact that have no answer to Intel's LGA2011 based launch later in the year tells me that they are either taking a wait and see approach or are pulling out of the high end market completely.

With shares falling and investors bailing, Bulldozer has to work for AMD or we may have to fear the worst. Losses cannot continue to pile up and they may be picked up, rather cheap in the end by a major competitor. The rumours of interest have been heard within the last month and they don't sound like a saving excercise either, more of a save the profitable parts and mothball the rest.

 

We don't have any idea what they will have to answer too.

I'm not sure whether to read the whole of this thread or just gossip over the fence with my neighbour about it.

 

OK so no change from AM2/+ then, at least people can bring forward their old chips if they want. I knew it would be a new motherboard whenever these chips arrived, the question is whether they have the two different boards depending on the RAM slot again, if they believe DDR4 has any demand whatsoever by the summer.

My Mum's PC died at the weekend, I need a cheap and quick replacement, that's AMD all the way, it's not the fastest by a long shot but I know the mobo always worked, and stability's what you want for a rellie's machine. I'm more annoyed that AMD just seemed to want GPU money and didn't have anything in the channel to really benefit from the Sandy Bridge screwup.

 

Go for it dude, I'm sure your neighbour will know more.

 

Aye, at 80-odd he knows quite a lot.

 

I think if AMD had something that was actually better than what Intel's offering they'd make that clear. The fact that they're just saying that it will compete with Intel's offering, to me, seems to suggest that at best it could offer similar performance, being better at certain things and worse at others.