Hardware AMD FX-8120 review

I was suspecting that was the case, from the absolute lack of information i'd heard about a different stepping, while AMD was busy pushing Piledriver as hard as they could.

 

A 3770k oc'd to 4.8Ghz uses 335!!! Watt less than a 8120 running at 4.5ghz, yes, the 3770k was in a matx board, but even if you knock off 20W thats still more than 300W difference.
Sure, if you are in a country with cheap electricity thats not relevant, but for example in Northern Ireland that is pretty much the equivalent of Bulldozer being banned from sale as you'd need a second mortgage to pay for the electricity it wastes.

 

I was reading this and thinking, no reason to throw my 1100T in the bin just yet and I got to the last sentence and it summed it all up. Meh!!!

 

Why the **** do AMD even bother with this shite anymore.
Never, ever compares to Intel on price, performance, pretty much everything that matters.

Are the engineers deluded when they make and try and market this crap?

 

again without AMD in this market Intel would charge what ever they want to - so how does a £500 i3 sound to you?

 

Wouldn't happen, Harlequin. Any time AMD is at risk of going under; Intel takes the rap for it. They need to outperform, but they literally cannot afford to shut them out of the market. Intel is not allowed to become the single distributor of CPUs, otherwise they'd do exactly as you said; sell existing parts for exuberant prices.

As is: AMD keeps going out of vain hope, perhaps they can turn the Orochi architecture into something good, but Bulldozer isn't, and i'm disappointed to have bought it, even if the whole setup was cheaper than a 2500K & an equivalent SLI-capable P67 board at the time when I did purchase.

 

so if AMD goes bankrupt , how wouldnt it happen?

 

If AMD goes Bankrupt; Intel wouldn't be allowed to buy them up in Liquidation, another company would have to take possession, to ensure that Intel still has competition.

 

You know what I realized? It seems that Bulldozer was basically an old plan drawn up during the Pentium 4 days. It has all of the hallmarks of it. A focus on parallelism, an emphasis on a form of hyperthreading, a change in cache architecture, a reliance on threading rather than a stronger FPU.. Hell even the extended pipeline cycles is reminiscent of Pentium 4.

What could save AMD though is if they manage to combine Bulldozer and their K8 architecture (just like Intel did with Nehalem (Pentium 4 + Core 2 Duo)). They managed to drag the K8 into K10 and compete with the height of Core 2 Duo. If they could leverage that with the innovations they made with Bulldozer and say, increase the efficiency of the memory controller and integer units and we could have on our hands something innovative and blazing fast from AMD.

That is of course if AMD goes through with it. And if they'll go back to hand designing things..

 

and what if no one bought them?

 

I'm pretty sure IBM, Fujitsu or some other guys would snatch it up. The problem though is that Intel is one of the few Fabbed companies.

 

It was supposed to happen but with Vishera 2 months away the chances of a B3 are nill.

'bdver 1' (the whole arch is I believe called bdver) is not quite as bad as the bit-tech test suite makes out, but still bad.

The bit-tech cpu test suite is quite awful.

Piledriver is bdver 2, but the really interesting stuff will be bdver 3 & 4.

 

i'll be keeping my i7 920 for a while.

 

i7 920 still kicking it in amds face what is it now 3 years later lol and thats the bottom end chip in the series,
Amd are truly not competing with intel anymore and if they dont start to improve they could be outta business. which is bad for everyone, gone are the days when they did produce fast chips

 

I love AMD. I now rock on a maximus v gene and a 2500k

 

As the financial crisis has taught us, they'll simply get tax money if they are risk of going under, so no need anymore for buying amd cpus as a charitable act.

 

Nah, that's just for banks and big manufacturers. AMD is fabless, so they can go right the hell under and the government won't care.

They're being propped up now by their low- and mid-range. Hard to tell, since enthusiast sites don't exactly cover the FM1 platform a whole lot, but that's where AMD makes money on the processor side these days.

They've sunk enough into it now that they'll keep on with the BD-derivations to the end of the roadmap they laid out (2014 or so, iirc), I suspect. I wouldn't be surprised if they bailed after that and concentrate on the low- and mid-range in the consumer space. What'll really kill them is if they can't come up with competitive server procs. AMD and Intel both make an absolute killing on server platforms, and things aren't so rosy for AMD there, either. BD is awesome at some very specific server applications, but that can't carry them. They need to get back to the drawing board and figure out how they'll beat Intel in the server space again.

For myself, I'll likely build my wife a PC on the FM1 platform as my next build. When it comes time to replace my own desktop (a ways off yet - my PII X3 is still going strong) I get the feeling I'll switch teams. I don't particularly want to, but when my old MB died, I got a AM3+ board, wanting to be ready for the future. Imagine my disappointment when the procs finally dropped and I realized there was no reason to replace a processor I paid $75 for with one that cost double to triple.

 

For some reason I get the inkling of a feeling that AMD might end up combining K10 and BD architectures. I'm sure there's still some way to pull it off. After all Intel did it before.

 

No they'll keep BD going until the end of time. K10 is dead and buried. Modernising K10 and 'fixing' BD would take up similar development budgets. Don't forget BD has only been 'warmed over' once and made into Trinity and looks pretty good for it. I look on BD as a rough CPU equivalent to the 2900xt, the core idea (VLIW5) is sound but substantial chunks of the design are inadequate and need rebuilding. The process technology, like for the 2900xt, also looks (and since Trinity, *looked)....'iffy'.

AMD have commited to 'warming over' BD every 12 months. Version 2 for desktops and servers (Trinity & Vishera/Abu Dhabi) is inbound shortly and looks to be substantially ...'less bad'. BD never struck me as being a total lost cause and has a very good chance of eventually maturing into something really rather good. Any serious, grown-up look at where things have gone wrong with BD says that it is let down (seriously) by deficiencies in a few key areas. The philosophy of the design and it's basic topology are not inherently wrong or misguided. David Kanter, the owner of realworldtech.com (excellent source of very indepth articles) basically surmised that it appears some areas of the architecture recieved a bare minimum of development time whereas others were very accomplished in their implementation.

Any investigation of BD worth a damn has flagged up 3 areas of concern:

1). Some serious L1 cache thrashing.
2.) Branch missprediction penalties are very, very high (branch predicition is however very good)
3.) Outside of server applications, the L2 cache is far too slow and a big drag on performance.

Piledriver nibbles away at the process problems and a host of small architecture niggles to make a much improved whole but addressing the issues listed above, especially points 1) and 2) will have to wait for the third and fourth revision of BD.

Intel never merged Pentium M (Conroe predecessor) and Pentium 4. Hyper Threading and a trace cache are not things that made the P4 a P4, a very long pipeline, high latencies for even common, simple instructions and horrendous branch-missprediction penalties were those things.

 

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5057/the-bulldozer-aftermath-delving-even-deeper/


^^ a good read on the opinion of where bulldozer went wrong and actually where it went right