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AMD Downgrades Bulldozer Transistor Count By 800 Million
Robadob writes "It has come to light that AMD PR had originally reported that the new Bulldozer processor's transistor count was 2 billion. AMD PR are now asking reviewers to correct this count to 1.2 billion from the original amount they provided ~3 months ago."
Backwards into the future.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
NO, you stupid AMD, don't do that...
The software retards get away with worse all the time, and *still* blame the hardware when their software is slow/buggy.
Get rid of 800 million transistors? Sure 800,000,000 vacuum tubes it is.
but this 66% is really outrageous
The FPU in these chips rounds 1.2 billion up to 2.0 billion.
With the new ceo ?
Normally the route of a true american corporate cultured corporation would be to deny everything and fool everyone and rip as much cash as it can. Until they were confronted at courts.
But now, amd marketing is rather needlessly contacting reviewers to make corrections, while taking a hit in p.r.
But is it really a hit ? Coupled with the fact that the new ceo kicked a lot of marketing staff, this tells me that the new term in amd is going to be a term reminiscent of early 90s in technology - a responsible era in which corporations have actually manufactured useful gadgets and sold them honestly, trying to get the edge on each other through tech - not with filthy dealings or deceit (hello intel and the bribery verdict)
Read radical news here
Seems the outsourced replacements punched in the "round up" function on the Excel spreadsheet instead of "round to nearest"...
I'm paying for *transistor count*, not GFLOPS!!!
Priorities, people!
I understand the importance of truth in advertising, but is this information meaningful, or just an insignificant correction? The magnitude of the difference alone doesn't automatically make this an important story, or the exposure of some big, inexcusable lie by AMD.
What's the true relevance of transistor count? If I see two processors with identical performance and power efficiency but radically different transistor counts do I have any real world incentive to select one over the other? I mean, presumably the one with fewer transistors in roughly the same die space might overclock better, might have a longer MTBF, etc., but beyond that should I care?
Or did timothy post this just to keep up the fanboi flame wars?
One has to wonder why they were using Pentium processors to calculate the transistor total, though.
I guess the new figures make a little more sense. Bulldozer's performance was fairly similar to their previous (and smaller) Thuban Core, at 904 million transistors -- it was as if AMD decided to take more than half of their transistor design budget, heap it in a corner, and set it on fire.
Does anyone have any idea why and how this happened? I mean, could there have been an intention to defraud or is this some sort of epic fail? TFA doesn't give much information.
It's not like we are going to count this any faster.
So a few points about this rather bizarre announcement:
1. Unfortunately for AMD this does nothing to reduce the power consumption of Bulldozer which is higher than a 3960x at stock speeds. When you remember that over 1/3 of the transistors on the CPU (using the new 1.2 Billion transistor count) are in the L3 cache that only runs at 2.2 Ghz while the L3 on the 3960x runs at full-speed, you have to wonder at whether GloFo's 32 nm process has some fundamental flaws, or if AMD didn't listen to GloFo's design rules (or some of both).
2. AMD's and GloFo's combined marketing of their "gate-first" 32 nm process bragged loudly and repeatedly that gate-first (as opposed to gate-last used by Intel) gave 20%+ transistor density benefits and that Intel's process wasn't truly 32 nm. Well, when Bulldozer was reported to have a die area of 315 mm^2 and a 2 billion transistor count, this seemed like a justified advantage. Now, however, the transistor density of Bulldozer is lower than any other 32nm design from either AMD or Intel. Note: the same AMD PR guys that adjusted the transistor count confirmed that the 315 mm^2 die size is still accurate.
Rory Read is smart to shift the focus away from these unmanufacturable monsters and to put it on the next-generation of Bobcat and Trinity designs where AMD can actually leverage it's only real advantage over Intel: the GPU.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
They are not some bungled mess of transistors, they are Real Transistors(tm) this time.
Who's gonna start counting? Methinks its a PR excercise for all the shit amd are copping not being able to best a sandy bridge quad core with 1.5x as many transistors and (according to AMD measurements) 2x as many cores.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
If you bought a V10 car and it turned out to have a 4 cylinder, you'd be upset. No?
AMD just clarified that Bulldozer does have 2 billion transistors after all, but only 1.2 billion work. Which explains something about its performance.
I recall seeing that the top Bulldozer only had 8MB L3 cache, which seemed a bit low - Intel's equivalent top-of-the-line desktop models reach 15MB, and the server models 30MB.
At first, I just figured they were targeting the middle price bracket, but then they priced against the high-end. So I would not be surprised if much of the missing (or disabled, if that rumor turns out to be true) transistors belong to the cache.
I just paid 110 $ for my FX-4100. I want a refund ! Oh who gives a hoot is goes very fast( 4.5GHz) and I can't count that high anyway.
AMD PR is about 2 meter away, in the vertical dimension, from AMD Engineering.
Yet, AMD PR is asking "Reviewers" to tell them, AMD PR, how many transistors the AMD Bulldozer has!
Why cannot AMD PR send someone to AMD Engineering and ask AMD Engineering how many transistors is in AMD Bulldozer? Is such a National Secret? Is AMD PR afraid? Is AMD Engineering under court order not to talk to AMD PR? How much money does it take for a reporter at the Wall Street Journal to bribe someone at AMD PR to walk to AMD Engineering and ask this National Security Super Duper question?
the square root of 2 billion is 45,000. So if a chip is one square centimeter, then u need to pack 45,000 in a hundredth of a meter, where .01/45000 is 200nm. so if its nothing but transistors, each transister can have 200 square nanometers and this was a 32nm process. sounds like theres about enuff space?
You're looking at it the wrong way. First, take a look at the size of your real CPU with 2 million transistors. Now imagine a square made up of 31.6 x 31.6 of those chips to equal 1000 times as many transistors. Think you could fit those all on the motherboard? Think you could get carry the heat away? Think your power mains could supply that kind of power?
Did anyone stop to wonder how many square mm 2 BILLION transistors would take up?
Well, that rather depends on how big they are.
It's MILLION, folks.
Yes, as in a thousand MILLION.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
-1 Stupid. We really need a new mod. :p
Excuse me, wtf r u doin?
The 16core server parts were listed as having 2.4billion transistors at launch so either the FX PR was wrong/confused and it really is 1.2Billion transistors as it they say it is now for an 8Core FX or AMD manged to bolts on an entire second 8core processor to the server parts with 400million more transistors.
In normal countries a billion is a million of millions, not a thousand millions.
I have to know... Are you joking, did you just wake up from a very long coma, or are you just deeply miseducated on the subject? I honestly can't tell if I'm supposed to laugh or cry.
Are you joking? What is your real CPU with 2 million transistors? Embedded CPUs? Even Pentium IV has models with more than 100 million transistors.
Look. You need to check your facts before you appear even more stupid than you already look. The 486 processors from Intel had more than 1 million transistors when introduced in 1989. Do you REALLY think we've only increased the transistor count by 20% in 22 years? Moore's law would suggest that the number of transistors should increase by a factor of 2^22 ~ 4 million during this time, giving us 4 billion transistors. We seem a little short of this, but processors have definitely reached the 1 billion mark.
Looking at it in terms of density, the 486 debuted with a 1 micrometer process (1000 nm). Bulldozer uses a 32 nanometer process. Roughly speaking this should allow 1000^2 / 32^2 ~ 1 thousand times more transistors. No matter how you look at it, 1 billion+ transistors is about right.
You are looking at this in the completely wrong way. You are assuming (wrongly) that current processors have 1 million transistors and trying to work backwards using that false assumption. If you are still in doubt, I would suggest calculating how large a real CPU with 2 million transistors at 32nm process would be. Hint: you would perhaps be able to see it with a magnifying glass, so lining up 31.6x31.6 of those on one 1cm^2 die seems the right ballpark to me.
Anybody that has ever looked at the schematic for a VLSI chip at the schematic level will have problems figuring out what the transistors are for because so many of them are actually being used as resistors, diodes, or capacitors. Many are bias regulators or interstage coupling voltage level translators. Transistors are the simplest things to put on an IC so there tends to be lots of them. The transistor count rarely translates into a true level of complexity for the device over all. Having said that the last time a transistor count on a microprocessor meant anything was with Motorola's first two major processors. The MC6800 actually had about 6,800 transistors. The MC68000 had about ... wait for it .... 68,000 of them!
Or perhaps he is confusing the international standard Billion (million x million) with the USA variant (1000 x million), in the rest of the world a USA billion is called a milliard, it is heaps of fun watching BBC presenters do sums since some of them accept the USA standard as de facto especially business correspondents while the science community does not ... which occasionally makes for some strange "misunderstanding" type TV.
Good stuff: =ceiling(A1)
Bad stuff: =floor(B1)
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Successful troll was successful.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.