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Written by Michael Schuette
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Jan 14, 2012 at 01:00 AM |
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Times are tough in Austin, which might be the understatement of the year. With Bulldozer turning out to be more interesting than performing and Krishna/Wichita being cancelled because of yield and other issues, there is not much left to build on. Not even staff after the latest layoffs. Arguably, the hottest item AMD currently has to throw into the the x86 mix is the Llano design, which, any way you look at it, is a sweet performer at low cost for any application including casual gaming or OpenGL rendering. With quite a few of the new designs being cancelled, it is not surprising that AMD is targeting refreshes to keep the fire alive – or maybe just the embers glowing. One of those refreshes is the new flagship A8 processor dubbed A8-3870K for Socket FM1 boards. The "K-factor" stands for unlocked, a somewhat flattering homage to Intel’s SandyBridge processors but who cares, sometimes you just have to go with the flow instead of trying to head where no man has gone before. Maybe it is just a matter of a lot of the marketing folks at AMD being of the “more beautiful” gender, who knows? And who would care anyway?
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Last Updated ( Jan 13, 2012 at 12:53 PM )
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Written by Michael Schuette
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Nov 24, 2011 at 08:02 AM |
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It used to be “War is the father of all things” and even if this is not a point of view that I personally subscribe to, the same motto still applies in a modified version, specifically: “competition fosters progress”. Of course, this begs the question what the father of all things is or even how to define progress. Merriam-Webster defines progress as:
a (1) : a royal journey marked by pomp and pageant
(2) : a state procession
b : a tour or circuit made by an official (as a judge)
c (1): an expedition, journey, or march through a region
(2) : a forward or onward movement (as to an objective or to a goal) : ADVANCE
(3): gradual betterment; especially : the progressive development of humankind
Quite honestly, I didn’t know what terms M-W would return but there are a number of choices that well describe what we are going to cover today and we’ll leave it to our readers to pick the most appropriate one.
Regardless of what definition of progress is used to describe SandyBridge Extreme, it seems fair to say that if it hadn’t been for AMD’s Bulldozer as the latest secret weapon against the Intelfidels, the latest iteration of Intel’s desktop flagship would probably not have seen the light of the day. Sandy Bridge Extreme is finally an Extreme Edition that fully deserves the EE moniker in every respect, starting with the number of lands, the transistor count, the number of memory channels, the power density and, before we forget it, the performance. To make a short story even shorter, SNBe performance dwarfs everything we have ever seen. Attributes to the speed of this CPU range from abominable to ridiculous and scary but the same applies to the cooling requirements and power consumption. Or maybe not. Time to separate the facts from myth!
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Last Updated ( Jan 13, 2012 at 11:38 AM )
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Written by Michael Schuette
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Oct 11, 2011 at 08:13 PM |
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Sometimes it is hard to find a beginning for an article, and it has nothing to do with writer’s block. On the contrary, there are so many things you want to say, it is just that they seem to be inappropriate. Like rubbing salt into the wound before the wound has even been afflicted. Sometimes it is just disappointment that takes over especially if there were high hopes and anticipations – even if they were against “better knowledge”. That’s kind of where we are today.
AMD’s Zambezi /Bulldozer architecture has been one of the most anticipated and novel approaches to the existing x86 concept. Building a modular CPU, streamlined towards where it counts, that is, emphasizing integer operations by doubling the number of “cores” and sharing a single floating point unit between the latter for optimal use of the available resources including footprint appears a valuable strategy. But paper is patient and theory is gray. As with all radical detours from the beaten path, there is an inherent risk that the well-planned strategy may not work and sometimes, it is as simple as an error of the transcription, like, on a scale of 1 to 5 where 1 is given as - - and 5 is given as a ++. And then, an engineer gets involved and does the math. And assumes the "--" has to be a “double-negative”. Let’s assume something like that must have happened.
To be honest, it is not that Zambezi is really bad, it is more that, given the features and core count, one would have expected a monster of performance and that is just not what AMD came up with. Rather, by the end of the day, we are looking at performance somewhere between a PhenomII 970 and a 1075T, arguably not the slowest performers in the current CPU scene but, arguably as well, no match for Sandy Bridge or any Westmere processors from the “other” CPU manufacturer.
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Last Updated ( Nov 27, 2011 at 01:47 PM )
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