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."

Comments

It was a rounding error

[Anonymous Coward]

The FPU in these chips rounds 1.2 billion up to 2.0 billion.

Re:It was a rounding error

[FatdogHaiku]

We are Pentium of Borg. Division is futile, you will be approximated!

They just lost my business!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm paying for *transistor count*, not GFLOPS!!!

Priorities, people!

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't this better? Doesn't this mean that the processor is smaller and more efficient?

Transistors are HUGE!!! You ever see a transistor radio?

I guess I just don't understand hardware. It just doesn't make sense to me. How can these fucking weird-ass CYLINDERS that are painted in stripes, plus weird flat "wires" on a green piece of whatever-the-fuck, actually do something? It makes NO SENSE.

Why?

[RobinEggs]

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?

Re:Why?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I suspect that transistor count means different things to different people.

The PR numbers provided for tech journalist previews and fan-wank benchmarks are pretty much just noise: If the number is big, you'll see a couple of sentences about "zOMG 2 Billion! motherfucker is a BEAST!". If the number is small, you'll see a couple of lines about how 'the foocorp design team was heavily focused on optimization for this generation'. The only thing the end customer will care about are the benchmarks at the end.

For people attempting to glean financially useful clues about a company's process strength or design prowess, or ability to hit some thermal target in the upcoming product cycle, transistor counts are likely much more relevant; but are also rather less likely to depend on PR numbers(actually reverse engineering a modern x86 chip would be Serious Business; but just paying somebody to crack the top off, get some die shots, and provide good ballpark numbers on transistor numbers and allocation between cache and various functional blocks should be relatively cheap compared to some of the moves you might make on the basis of such information...)

It seems bafflingly weird that PR would provide a number so grossly wrong, since the fanboys and the haters basically make no real use of the number and the people who really care should be able to easily detect a lie of that magnitude; but I'd be somewhat surprised if the original PR numbers meant all that much.

Re:Why?

[rbmyers]

Bulldozer has apparently been a disappointment. Why? One wonders. One suspects that AMD encountered some late-in-the-game, unexpected, and very unpleasant surprises. Maybe 2 billion is closer to the number they wanted it to have. Sounds more and more like the NetBurst Story. Intel never did figure out how to add in enough transistors to make the design work well without breaking the power budget. Robert.

Re:Why?

[icebike]

Or maybe 2billion is what the thing actually has, but in order to get it to work they had to abandon a significant portion even if they still exist on the chip.
It wouldn't be the first time unused banks of memory were left on chip but simply abandoned.

Re:Why?

[msauve]

"It seems bafflingly weird that PR would provide a number so grossly wrong"

Not really.

Marketeer: How many transistors in the new chip?
Engineer: We're up over a billion now.
Marketeer: Ok, thanks. 2 billion.

Re:Why?

[mobby_6kl]

Or maybe 2B is what Bulldozer actually has, but their new PR team came up with the idea: claim it only has 1.2B transistors, so even though it still sucks, at least it doesn't need 2 billion transistors to do it.

Re:Why?

[poity]

PR department playing telephone
First person: "We have 1.2 billion transistors"
Next person: "Wow, that's about 1 and a quarter billion transistors!"
Next person: "Wait, 1 and quarter billion transistors? That's almost 1.5 billion!"
Next person: "Holy shit, 1.5 billion transistors? That's nearly 2 billion!"

Re:Why?

[marcosdumay]

"I suspect that transistor count means different things to different people."

No, it means nearly nothing to anybody. The closest one I've seen is another answer to this thread linking it to cache sizes, but even then, people measure caches on bytes, not transistors.

Buyers want software performance, measured by benchmarks, cache size + instruction throughput, or any other functional metric. Engineers care more about hight level units, except where they optimize deeper, fabs care about die area. Nobody cares about how many times a poly line crosses over a crystaline line.

By the way, that is probably the reason such a huge mistake in the number could be made. Nobody cared.

Re:Why?

[realityimpaired]

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?

If you can find one processor with 2 billion transistors, and another with 1.2 billion, and they both draw exactly the same power requirements, performance, instruction set, and have the same heat envelope, then either somebody in marketing is lying, or somebody is doing something horribly wrong. On the one hand, it should not take 2 billion transistors to do something that can be done with 2/3 of that, but on the other hand, if you have 1/3 fewer transistors, you should experience an according decrease in heat leakage.

That being said, numbers like transistor count matter to enthusiasts. These are the same people who used to spend $1000 to buy the 3.8GHz P4 chip instead of the $300 3.4GHz chip. For some folks on the market, bigger == better, and there's no point in trying to explain to them that they can accomplish the same job with a less powerful chip. Some people build/buy/upgrade computers so that they can brag about being more powerful than their buddies, and when you couple that mentality with a disposable income, well, you know the rest.

For somebody like me, it's not likely to make a big difference. But I'm typing this on a laptop that's powered by a Celeron U3600 ULV chip... a dual core 1.2GHz processor that's designed for low power consumption, not high performance. It's been a long time since I have built/bought a high performance system, and I'm unlikely to get back into that game for a while: I gave up on computer gaming years ago. The one thing in this announcement that may give me pause next time I build a system is that a revision from 2 billion to 1.2 billion transistors probably means some kind of manufacturing problem that they thought they could overcome, but are now not thinking they can. Even if that's not the case, AMD is going to have egg on their face a while over this one.

Slightly smaller disaster

[Guppy]

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.

Not helping their cause much....

[CajunArson]

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.

Re:Class action lawsuit please

[RobinEggs]

If you bought a V10 car and it turned out to have a 4 cylinder, you'd be upset. No?

Yeah, if it turned out it couldn't climb hills and had a 0 - 60 time of 17.1 seconds. If it performed like I wanted and happened to have only 4 cylinders I wouldn't care. Unless one of my primary 'needs' was for everyone to know I had a big-ass 'engine', if you know what I mean.

Put more directly, benchmarks and statistics are just dick measuring without some context.

There's a new update

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD just clarified that Bulldozer does have 2 billion transistors after all, but only 1.2 billion work. Which explains something about its performance.

Re:There's a new update

[ShieldW0lf]

and the other 800,000,000 are looking for employment elsewhere ?

No, they're just Occupying space.

Re:Serious policy changes here ?

[mug funky]

what about examples from outside the USA? BP stands for British Petroleum, don't you know?

some of the food scares going on in China are just scary - melamine in milk, cooking oil salvaged and re-refined from retail liquid waste... of course, people got the death penalty for the milk thing.

Re:Class action lawsuit please

[SpazmodeusG]

They told you the V10 engine used 50 hours of labour in its manufacture but it turned out the V10 engine only used 25 hours of labour in its manufacture.

It's still the same engine in every way. Transistor count is simply a manufacturing detail.

Re:LOL

[hairyfeet]

From the looks of it Bulldozer is another Phenom I, where they have to use a generation getting the bugs out. Phenom II was and is an excellent chip BTW, sure its not gonna slaughter the latest and greatest from Intel but the dirty little secret AMD and Intel don't want to talk about is that for 95%+ of the users out there PCs have been "good enough" for quite some time. hell I'm the kind of guy that was building himself a new PC practically every year in the past, now my AMD Deneb quad is going on 3 years old and if I get that Thuban upgrade i plan to for my BDay i could easily see it lasting another 5 years, maybe more.

The smart move which I applaud the new AMD CEO for doing is cutting down on the desktop product to crank the living hell out of mobile because that is where the money is at right now. you look at Brazos and they have been selling out of those chips as fast as they can crank them and as an owner of a EEE E-350 netbook I can see why, 6 hours of battery life running full Win 7 HP X64, takes 8Gb of RAM easily, does full HD video without a stutter, low heat, and its a great little multitasker chip, running head and shoulder better than Atom and often beating ION at a lower price. The OEMs have taken notice it seems as i have seen Brazos in netbooks, all in ones, and HTPCs all over the place. Walking into my local Walmart the other day, a place that just a few years ago was strictly Intel land, more than 3/4ths of the laptop/netbooks and virtually all the desktops were AMD Fusion. I asked one of the guys I knew there about them and he said 'These things are selling like crazy, great for video and FB' which is of course where most folks are nowadays.

Frankly I think the path AMD is on is the smart one right now but its gonna have teething problems. They are in the process of switching their GPUs from VLIW to vector and looking at the chip bulldozer arch is really made for the new vector GPUs that simply aren't finished. by switching to vector you'll have a super FP that the CPU can hand off heavy math to when not in use for gaming while having a smaller FP on the CPU thus allowing more cores per chip. Like the switch to Stars its gonna take some teething pains to get everything switched over to the new designs and having GloFlo drop the ball certainly didn't help.

Personally I can easily see a day where Intel owns the top end and that is pretty much it, as AMD cranks out the chips for the low and midrange. Frankly the dual core Brazos is more powerful than 90% of the jobs my customers could come up with and I can see a quad version pretty much owning the low and midrange sectors due to the combo of price/performance and lower power. Just give them time folks, they are still cranking out Denebs and Thubans so I'd stick with those for now and let the new BD arch get the bugs worked out and by the time the chip after Piledriver comes out the boards and laptops will be cheap and plentiful. Until then just stick with Thuban, Mobile Phenom II and Brazos.