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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...
Get rid of 800 million transistors? Sure 800,000,000 vacuum tubes it is.
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
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?
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.
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.
perhaps because intel already have products with more than 2 billion transistors and they didn't want to be left behind. Those than can do, those that can't lie?
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.
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.
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.
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!
Actually that's our job - as the HW geeks keep making things faster, we have to work hard to use up all those extra cycles! I remember the days when we could fill all of RAM (actually core) with a single subroutine! Now we have to make all these wisy things, useless services, and general useless cycle-burners to try to keep up. It used to be that we could just toss in an extra FOR I=1,1000; NEXT I and use up a second or two. Now we have to load up the I/O with hundreds of packets in a dozen different phony protocols tossing messages back and forth across the network to do the same thing.
It's a tough job, but we're up to it! Object oriented programming has helped a lot, and scripting languages have helped even more, but those HW folks aren't making our lives any easier. It's like they don't even WANT to slow things down.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Good stuff: =ceiling(A1)
Bad stuff: =floor(B1)
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
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...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.