AMD conFusion? Forget the hype!, Bulldozer, Bobcat, Fusion... explained at last. Options

[nobody813]

News regarding ADM products as a whole

AMD Outlines Its 2012-2013 Client Roadmap, Big Focus is on APUs

[philo-sofa]

Having just read nobody's link, does anyone else suspect it's in AMD's gamplan to use Binary Translation or something similar to move tasks to the SI graphics core? We'd see some epuic speed boosts almost across the board, especially with all those threads around on the CPU side to do the translation legwork from x86. However I don't know if that's realistic or if I'm barking up the wrong tree (for now at least).

EDIT - below image is interesting re the above, specifically the bit about "compute IP rapidly leveraged in low-power platforms, via APUs" - compute generally referring to GPGPU for the uninitiated:

Thrashes everything but Gulftown CPU's

That's not what their own conclusions say at all:

With this just being the first article of a series looking at the AMD FX-8150 "Bulldozer" under Linux, more conclusions will be drawn later. However, as these results show, under Linux the AMD FX-8150 is a competitive product to the Intel Core i5 2500K when dealing with multi-threaded workloads. For single-threaded work and other select tasks, the Bulldozer performance is disappointing.

'Competietive' =/= 'thrashing'. It's fairly similar to the Windows reviews, the FX-8150 matches an 2500K in highly-threaded apps/benches and as you correctly say doesn't quite keep up in lowly-threaded ones.

This post has been edited by philo-sofa: Feb 3 2012, 11:12 AM

[nobodyishere]

My housemate bought a FX-8120 and a Asus Crosshair 5 formula motherboard, 8gb gskill 1866mhz cas9 dual channel kit the other day and we have been comparing real-world games performance between our 2 rigs, and a few games have really weird performance issues on his rig, sw:tor and f1 2011 in particular, check it out:

exact specs:
mine:
Intel i5 2500k @ 3.3ghz - turbo disabled (for comparison testing we did the other night)
Gigabyte z68XP-UD4
Gigabyte Radeon 4890 1gb
Mushkin 4gb ddr3 1600mhz cas6 ram

his:
FX-8120 @ 3.1ghz - turbo enabled (in 2 mod/4core results, max turbo speed reached was 3.4ghz)
Asus Crosshair 5 formula
gskill 8gb ddr 1866mhz cas9 ram
Asus Radeon 6870 x2 in crossfire

in SW:TOR with vsync disabled, all on max settings except AA (off) and shadows (low)
mine: 24fps min, 46fps max @ 1920x1080@60hz
his: 15fps min, 44fps max ( all 8 cores enabled)
his: 28fps min, 46fps max ( 4cores enabled/2modules, 2 modules/cores disabled)

f1 2011 glitches out (colour/textures) and sits at 19fps...

He is running the latest bios on the rog board, and it doesn't show an option to disable individual cores, only entire modules, we wanted try only 4cores/4modules in games vs 8cores/4modules but the damn bios isnt showing us the options to do it. We are still trying to narrow down exactly what is causing the 8core results to be worse then the 4core results, hopefully we will find it within the next couple of days and ill post up some better results.

[nobody813]

That is bloody confusing haha

I know Gigabyte boards have the options of modules and core disabling

*shrugs*

F1 2011 playing up makes me think something else is wrong

This post has been edited by nobody813: Feb 3 2012, 11:38 AM

[mark84]

F1 2011 playing up makes me think something else is wrong

The amount of issues we're having in the comp with this game I wouldn't put it past the game code itself :)
But yeah probably something else.

[nobody813]

F1 2011 playing up makes me think something else is wrong

The amount of issues we're having in the comp with this game I wouldn't put it past the game code itself :)
But yeah probably something else.

sora's system was fine with it, and that's similar overall

Still confused haha

[A Hitman]

his: 15fps min, 44fps max ( all 8 cores enabled)
his: 28fps min, 46fps max ( 4cores enabled/2modules, 2 modules/cores disabled)

That's quite a massive increase, I wonder if it actually is disabling a core on each module but reporting it incorrectly.

This post has been edited by A Hitman: Feb 3 2012, 12:45 PM

[Jeruselem]

So the Bulldozer patch is effective as old AMD dual-core patch for XP ... pretty useless.

[sora3]

@ Dasa, I think I still have it somewhere...here: http://forums.atomicmpc.com.au/index.php?showtopic=46428

Mind you, I haven't updated with the latest stuff such as the 7zip and the AIDA benchmarks. If needed, I'll post the rest of the benchmarks up. The consensus is that if you're moving from the 1st gen Phenom II to this, it is a good move. However, anything else is a bit of a waste. Plus, the 6850 is a major limitation in terms of graphics as I'm hitting the frame ceiling faster than anything else. I might need to 'borrow' those 7970s at work.

@ nobodyishere, that's odd. I remember the ROG Crosshair V SHOULD have the option to disable modules in the 1003. Sounds like it wasn't updated to the newest version. Oddly enough, my FX CPU is fine with F1 2011 so something ELSE must be the root cause of it. Check the drivers as those were the headache for me majority of the times.


This post has been edited by sora3: Feb 3 2012, 04:42 PM

[nobody813]

Compal's AMD Trinity Reference-Design Notebook Pictured

[nobodyishere]

@ Dasa, I think I still have it somewhere...here: http://forums.atomicmpc.com.au/index.php?showtopic=46428

Mind you, I haven't updated with the latest stuff such as the 7zip and the AIDA benchmarks. If needed, I'll post the rest of the benchmarks up. The consensus is that if you're moving from the 1st gen Phenom II to this, it is a good move. However, anything else is a bit of a waste. Plus, the 6850 is a major limitation in terms of graphics as I'm hitting the frame ceiling faster than anything else. I might need to 'borrow' those 7970s at work.

@ nobodyishere, that's odd. I remember the ROG Crosshair V SHOULD have the option to disable modules in the 1003. Sounds like it wasn't updated to the newest version. Oddly enough, my FX CPU is fine with F1 2011 so something ELSE must be the root cause of it. Check the drivers as those were the headache for me majority of the times.

Yep, the board came with bios 0813 as default, as soon as he assembled everything together he flashed it to the newest (1102) on the website, unless you have to press a key combo to "unlock" more advanced settings like gigabytes crtl-F1 combo for example, its not there, the options are: disable core 1 & 2, 3 & 4, 5 & 6, 7 & 8 and thats it :(

the whole reason he splurged on the Rog board was to be able to disable individual cores on a module and to run it as a super quad for gaming, cause thats literally the only thing he does on his pc. The Rog board certainty has its quirks (disabling C-states sometimes doesnt stick with every boot, cant set XMP profiles, have to manually specify the frequency and latency settings), but it doesnt suprize when i take into the account of the issues i ran into on my intel system, ill bet its ends up being something simple thats causing him issues, gonna be funny watching him figure it out lol.

[nobody813]

If I were given an FX-8xxx chip, I'd probably disable the secondary cores if I could. Most things I do don't even tax all the cores on my Phenom II X4 let alone 8 threads :-P

[Dasa]

nobodyishere first thing i would try doing with performance drops like that is disable crossfire

[nobodyishere]

nobodyishere first thing i would try doing with performance drops like that is disable crossfire

yeah he has tried that, my bet is its his PSU, its a fairly old cooler master 850w. Does anybody know if he has to have both the 4pin and eps8pin connected for the cpu power?

[sora3]

nobodyishere first thing i would try doing with performance drops like that is disable crossfire

yeah he has tried that, my bet is its his PSU, its a fairly old cooler master 850w. Does anybody know if he has to have both the 4pin and eps8pin connected for the cpu power?

No. He only needs the 8pin EPS attached to the board. 850 watts is plenty for a Crossfire system and the FX realistically. Something else must be effecting his performance.

[Dasa]

nobodyishere first thing i would try doing with performance drops like that is disable crossfire

yeah he has tried that, my bet is its his PSU, its a fairly old cooler master 850w. Does anybody know if he has to have both the 4pin and eps8pin connected for the cpu power?

No. He only needs the 8pin EPS attached to the board. 850 watts is plenty for a Crossfire system and the FX realistically. Something else must be effecting his performance.

if its a cm extreme 850 they provide far less power than that and are not exactly reliable but still performance problems from psu are rare and i guess that pc will only be drawing ~250-400w

[sora3]

nobodyishere first thing i would try doing with performance drops like that is disable crossfire

yeah he has tried that, my bet is its his PSU, its a fairly old cooler master 850w. Does anybody know if he has to have both the 4pin and eps8pin connected for the cpu power?

No. He only needs the 8pin EPS attached to the board. 850 watts is plenty for a Crossfire system and the FX realistically. Something else must be effecting his performance.

if its a cm extreme 850 they provide far less power than that and are not exactly reliable but still performance problems from psu are rare and i guess that pc will only be drawing ~250-400w

I was assuming 75% efficiency so 600 watt is still a lot... >>

Dasa, there is also another thing to consider. Not all of the CPUs are 'equal'. On Xtremesystems, some of the people noted that the 8150 (and to some extent, the 8120) can barely clock to 5GHz whilst the 6100 oddly enough, can. So I'm not sure if the disabled core is helping here or something else is just playing up. >>

[Dasa]

75% efficient 600w isnt how its supposed to work but it may help explain how they come up with generic psu ratings 50% efficiency 300w load = 600w at the wall and maybe some samples can provide there rated power for under a second in sub 0 temps before they go pop
a psu rated for 850w should be able to provide 850w @25-50c depending on the quality before it cuts out at 850w draw from the psu it may be drawing 1000w from the wall depending on its efficacy

cm fans advertise something like 80cfm 19db 2000rpm but the 19db is achieved at the minimum rpm the fan will spin at... clever marketing at work and the sad thing is it does work

im well aware all cpu are not equal i have had a run of duds myself but then i have been rather blessed with the overclocking ability of most my gpu

This post has been edited by Dasa: Feb 4 2012, 10:10 AM

[SceptreCore]

News regarding AMD products as a whole

AMD Outlines Its 2012-2013 Client Roadmap, Big Focus is on APUs

'Jaguar' cores. Looks like they're sticking with the Bobcat arch.

Compal's AMD Trinity Reference-Design Notebook Pictured

Details of Piledriver arch soon I guess.

[meowkitty]

any more talk from AMD of system on a chip?