AMD's Next-Gen Steamroller CPU Could Deliver Where Bulldozer Fell Short

MojoKid writes "Today at the Hot Chips Symposium, AMD CTO Mark Papermaster is taking the wraps off the company's upcoming CPU core, codenamed Steamroller. Steamroller is the third iteration of AMD's Bulldozer architecture and an extremely important part for AMD. Bulldozer, which launched just over a year ago, was a disappointment. The company's second-generation Bulldozer implementation, codenamed Piledriver, offered a number of key changes and was incorporated into the Trinity APU family that debuted last spring. Steamroller is the first refresh of Bulldozer's underlying architecture and may finally deliver the sort of performance and efficiency AMD was aiming for when it built Bulldozer in the first place. Enhancements to Fetch and Decode architecture have been made, as well as increased scheduler efficiency and cache load latency, which combined could bring a claimed 15 percent performance-per-watt performance gain. AMD expects to ship Steamroller sometime in 2013 but wouldn't offer timing detail beyond that."

Comments

AMD has cool code names.

[Anonymous Coward]

They all sound like sexual positions.

Re:AMD has cool code names.

[Johann Lau]

And Intel ones don't? Who are you kidding?

Aladdin
Bad Axe
Bad Axe 2
Batman
Batman's Revenge
Big Laurel
Black Pine (a cute name for anal sex I guess)
Black Rapids (I don't want to know)
Bonetrail
Caneland
Cougar Canyon
Glidewell
Tanglewood (sounds bi to me)
Warm Springs

and last, but never least, the

Windmill (also known as "Helicopter Dick")

Re:AMD has cool code names.

[dbIII]

In some races they are just about alone on the track. An AMD based server with 64 cores and 128GB of memory will set you back $9000. with Intel you can now get 80 cores for about ten times that, or 40 cores for about five times that.
For some tasks when you can get 640 slightly slower cores (the ten core Intel chips have a lower clock than the ones with less cores) for the same price as 80 it's pretty easy to see which way to go. If anything is massively parallel you can forget about Intel at this point.

Re:AMD has cool code names.

[gweihir]

Indeed. I think AMD is actually far ahead of Intel (again, think e.g. integrated memory controller, for quite a few server-loads Intel was vastly behind for a time due to that). The speed increases of CPUs have become slower and slower and mater less and less. The trick for AMD will be to survive intact until Intel gives up and gets a next-gen architecture of their own. By then AMD will have ironed out the kinks and they will be on an equal footing again. When looking at their relative sizes and cash-reserves, it is impressive that AMD can compete at all. But the bottom-line is that in almost all cases (exception: You need a small number of CPUs with high power because your software is stupid, and cost of the CPUs is not an issue) you get significantly better value for the money from AMD.

Re:AMD has cool code names.

[rullywowr]

They should just drop the "driver" and name it "pile."

They need to innovate

[Gothmolly]

Things like hitting the 1GHz mark first, and making a workable 64bit chip that also speaks x86 only get you so far. AMD needs to come up with something cool, else they're doomed to play catch-up.

Re:They need to innovate

[ArhcAngel]

Well they definitely need to step up with their current offerings but I will forever be grateful for their 64 bit x86 extensions. If not for that we'd be stuck with Itanium desktops...*SHUDDER*...

Re:They need to innovate

[TheRealMindChild]

Really? I got a nice combo bundle (case, PSU, AMD "APU", ram, motherboard) for $120, shipped. It runs Diablo 3 and all of my steam games with no trouble. What can you get me with Intel offerings that can do the same, at that price?

Re:They need to innovate

[tlhIngan]

CPUs don't really drive software development that much. Or else we would have migrated off x86 years ago. If intel can get the same/similar performance without a paradigm shift in development methodology, developers won't bother.

The migration from x86 has already started, actually - the architecture they're moving to is ARM. (After all, there are more ARM-based SoCs shipped than x86 CPUs - every PC includes one or more ARM cores doing something).

But on a more user level - tablets, smartphones are becoming the computing platforms of the day, all running ARM processors. Regardless of whether they run iOS or Android. Developers have embraced it and cranking out tons of apps and games and other stuff for this. It's so scary that Intel's investing a lot of money bringing Android to x86 because the writing's on the wall (when more phones and tablets ship than PCs...)

But x86 won't die - it has a raw performance advantage that ARM has yet to reach, so for computation-heavy operations like databases, it'll be the heavy lifter. Perhaps serving an entire array of ARM frontend webservers.

Re:They need to innovate

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel completely dominates AMD in terms of process tech, but due to antitrust concerns, they tweak their prices so that AMD can stay barely alive in the "budget segment".

In the last 20 years, AMD had the best parts for only 2 years, and were in the running for maybe another 3-4 years. The game has always been rigged in Intel's favor.

Re:They need to innovate

[hairyfeet]

Not to mention there is a BIG rotting elephant in the room that nobody is talking about which is this: If you don't like Windows 8? You're screwed if you buy a new AMD chip. You see the braintrust at AMD didn't bother to keep MSFT in the loop about what they were cooking up with their "half core" design and now that BD and soon SR will be out there MSFT has made it clear that the scheduler bug is a WILL NOT FIX except in Windows 8.

So if you run XP, Vista, or Windows 7 with one of the new AMD chips you either have to disable half the cores or Windows will treat it as hyperthreading and tie a nice boat anchor to your new chip. This is why you can disable half the modules (thus making them like a traditional chip) and your benches will go UP and not down, because Windows doesn't know WTF to do with such a strange CPU, just as it didn't know what to do with the first hyperthreaded chips. This is also why the Thubans will win in most benches against the BD chips, even though BD has more cores, because Windows doesn't know about the half cores and how to schedule them properly.

I just hope the new chip designer they hired away from Apple can do some good and come up with another truly great design, because otherwise AMD is stuck with a chip that will only run correctly on an OS that looks to be the most hated Windows since MS Bob.

As someone who has put my money where my mouth is and not built a single Intel PC since the bribery and compiler rigging came out I've been sticking with AM3 but its getting harder and harder, and since my customers aren't going to Windows 8 I may have to start looking at Intel again. After all who is gonna want to buy a system that has to get stuck with Win 8 just to have it run correctly?

Re:They need to innovate

[hairyfeet]

Ya know what? Nothing wrong with cheap and "good enough" the problem has been their new designs are cheap and shitty thanks to that lame "half core" they went for.

You take a good 85%+ of the people out there and a MOR AMD Deneb quad will frankly be twiddling its thumbs because it will blow through any jobs that they have, even gaming, even more so for Thuban. And their Brazos chips were fricking great, an APU designed for mobile video and basic tasks that got great battery life while often being cheaper than an Atom+ION setup.

I've sold many an Athlon II and Phenom II and the people are damned happy with them, they just blast through everything they want to do with plenty of cycles left over. I even put my money where my mouth is with regards to my family, me and the oldest are gaming on Thubans while the youngest took my Deneb, and they blow through any game we throw at 'em.

I see from TFA they've partially dropped the "half core" design but I can only hope that with Piledriver they'll drive a stake through it, as most of the people I've talked to Win 8 is a DO NOT WANT yet the half core scheduler bug is only fixed in Win 8. Meh, hopefully I'll still be able to get enough Thuban, Deneb, and Liano chips to get me through the whole BD/SR phase and the new Apple chip designer they hired will give us another Athlon64. One can hope after all.

Re:They need to innovate

[afidel]

or Windows will treat it as hyperthreading and tie a nice boat anchor to your new chip.

Actually it's the opposite, the system SHOULD be treating the co-cores like HT units and not scheduling demanding jobs on adjacent cores (at least not ones that both need the FP unit or lots of decode operations). The problem is that AMD basically lied to the OS and told it that every core is the same and that it can go ahead and schedule anything wherever it wants. If they had just marked the second portion of each co-core as an HT unit the normal scheduler optimizations would have basically handled 99% of cases correctly. In reality BD's problem wasn't so much the gaff with the co-cores (though that certainly didn't help things), but that Global Foundry is more than a process node behind Intel (one node plus 3D transistors).

Re:They need to innovate

[iamhassi]

Ya know what? Nothing wrong with cheap and "good enough" the problem has been their new designs are cheap and shitty thanks to that lame "half core" they went for.

You take a good 85%+ of the people out there and a MOR AMD Deneb quad will frankly be twiddling its thumbs because it will blow through any jobs that they have, even gaming, even more so for Thuban. And their Brazos chips were fricking great, an APU designed for mobile video and basic tasks that got great battery life while often being cheaper than an Atom+ION setup.

I've sold many an Athlon II and Phenom II and the people are damned happy with them, they just blast through everything they want to do with plenty of cycles left over. I even put my money where my mouth is with regards to my family, me and the oldest are gaming on Thubans while the youngest took my Deneb, and they blow through any game we throw at 'em.

I see from TFA they've partially dropped the "half core" design but I can only hope that with Piledriver they'll drive a stake through it, as most of the people I've talked to Win 8 is a DO NOT WANT yet the half core scheduler bug is only fixed in Win 8. Meh, hopefully I'll still be able to get enough Thuban, Deneb, and Liano chips to get me through the whole BD/SR phase and the new Apple chip designer they hired will give us another Athlon64. One can hope after all.

This. I have a six-core 1055T. Bought it to overclock and it does hit 4ghz stable on air but guess what? I run it at stock 2.8ghz. Why? Because 99.9% of the time six cores at 2.8ghz is more than enough. Even games run perfectly. CPUs have finally reached the point where faster isn't better anymore, its power usage and heat output. Rather have it run cool using little power at stock then run it full blast all the time sucking watts and heating the room at 4ghz I'm not even using.

When I bought this intel didn't have anything close in price that performed as well. Sure I could have spent double and bought a faster intel chip, but why? What was the point of spending more on something I wouldn't use? Rather spend the $ on a ssd for real performance gains then extra ghz I'd never use. So I bought AMD and I'll probably do it again next year if the price is reasonable and the speed is "good enough"

Re:They need to innovate

[the_humeister]

This is just so weird. 20 years ago it was Alpha, MIPS, SPARC, PA-RISC, etc. that were the ones counted to do all the heavy lifting backend, HPC stuff. x86 was kind of a joke that everyone frowned upon but tolerated because it was cheap and did the job adequately for the price. Then x86 steamrolled through. Now no more Alpha or PA-RISC. MIPS is relagated to low-power applications (my router has one).

Re:They need to innovate

[hairyfeet]

In ANY case, which your description does make sense, the problem is NOT with GloFlo but squarely with AMD.

If they would have let MSFT in on the idea from the start (and no point not telling them, it isn't like Intel was gonna gut their superior performing Core line to completely re-engineer their chips to steal an AMD idea) then they could have written the scheduler to recognize the AMD chips and treat them as modules instead of cores but they kept MSFT in the dark and now frankly everyone is getting punished because if you want a fully functional chip on XP, Vista, or 7 you should avoid AMD like the clap.

Personally I thought the whole idea was retarded except for the mobile chips like Brazos, on the desktop the idea was completely stupid and on the server even more so. For those that don't know the original plan was to go "Full APU" and have the GPU take the place of the FP on chip, which would be a much simpler and weaker design than in years past thus freeing up more TDP for more cores. Why is this dumb? Well what if you want to use the GPU AND do some floating point heavy task? Or what if you don't want the integrated GPU because you can't OC worth a crap with the GPU built in?

Frankly the ONLY place that would have been a really good idea is Brazos, because you could then use the die space to have a quad core APU that would use very little power when not doing FP heavy tasks yet would still have excellent multimedia capability thanks to the powerful GPU taking up the slack. Instead the braintrust at AMD killed the replacement for Brazos, instead going for the usual minor speed up thanks to die shrink. That is completely moronic as Brazos was selling as fast as they could crank them out and even today you still see laptops up to 15 inch using Brazos, so a quad Brazos II that used less than 17w under load and got great multimedia and even okay gaming would have been a slam dunk, and instead they bet it all on BD arch which unless they pull off a miracle may be their very own Netburst. Whereas Netburst was clock above all the BD design is cores above all and in both cases just bad design.

I'm sure AMD fanboys will have a shitfit but this is from someone who owns not a single Intel unit, my netbook is Brazos, my Office box is a Sempron nettop, and I'm typing this on my Thuban home machine. So I WANT AMD to succeed, I really really do. I remember what it was like when Intel had a monopoly and it wasn't good for anybody. After all if it wasn't for Athlon64 giving Intel a spanking we'd probably have 8GHz Netburst space heaters right now. But if AMD is gonna survive they are gonna have to do better, simple as that. I truly hope that the new chip designer they lured away from Apple can give them a kick ass design, because there really isn't a selling point for BD right now. It sucks more power, is more expensive, gets less performance than Thuban which can be had for MUCH cheaper, and it doesn't work well with anything but Windows "Hai I Iz A Smartphone LOL" 8, which looks to be as big a bomb as Vista or even Bob.

Re:They need to innovate

[hairyfeet]

Hi fellow Thuban user! I have the 1035T and my oldest has the 1045T and like you I got some crazy OCing when I first got it (I ended up with 3.5GHz with 3.9GHz turbo) before going back to stock because even at 2.6Ghz it just mows through everything.

What I really love is the TurboCore, with my Asrock board I can tweak to my hearts content but even at stock settings with TC I'm getting a little over 3GHz when gaming thanks to most games using 3 cores or less. No muss, no fuss, it just kicks it in automatically when I need the single threaded boost. And with the N520 cooler, which I paid a grand total of $30 for, it stays around 8 degrees above room temp idle and never hits above 127F even when the cores are being pounded. When you can keep a chip that cool with just a $30 heatpipe cooler and arctic silver what's not to like?

What did it for me though was like you how much I could save while still having damned good performance. I have 2 teen boys that also game so I try to keep us pretty close to parity and when you can grab a complete 6 core kit for $345 and that's BEFORE the MIR gives you another $30 off? It was a no brainer. I got myself the Thuban, gave the youngest my X4 925, which considering he prefers MMOs is frankly overkill, while the oldest ended up with a kit I just like I linked to given to him by his grandpa as a back to school present before I could grab it for him.

All told for THREE systems, with the family pack of Win 7 HP X64 and 3 HD 4850 GPUs? $1400 before the MIRs, after I got those back all told it was around $390 a system. You just can't beat that and all the games we play run just beautiful at the 1600x900 res our screens run on. In a year to a year and a half I'll pick up some 6770s or 6850s when they drop to the $50 price range and make my money back on the 4850s off of CL. With two hexas and a quad we couldn't be happier, the kids gaming and movies, my gaming and transcoding along with multitrack audio editing? We have tons of cycles to spare.

So I have to agree, what's the point when these systems already can tear through anything we care to do at half the price of a similar Intel unit?

Re:They need to innovate

[QuantumRiff]

That may be true in the consumer space, but is not anywhere close in the server space.

We specced recently a pair of Dell servers, (poweredge 810 and 815). Both with 256G of ram. Difference between the 810, with dual 6-core CPU's, and the dual AMD 16 cores? About $7500 per server. Both the CPU, and the RAM are much, much cheaper. The Ram might run slightly slower, but since were mainly using it for "buffer" space in Oracle, we don't care.. its still 1000X faster than disk. And our software doesn't need another few hundred Hz of speed per thread, we need lots and lots of threads.. Btw, that difference in price, is about the same as the cost of a Fusion-IO card for each server.. which will add much more of a performance boost to the DB and apps than a fancy processor. :)

Re:They need to innovate

[MrFlibbs]

Actually, the "best gaming CPU for the money" article to which you refer only gives the FX-4170 a rating of "Honorable Mention". These are Tom's Hardware recommendations for gaming CPUs at varying price points (from the July version of the article):

~$70: Pentium G630
$100: Pentium G870
$110: None (FX-4170 Honorable Mention)
$125: Core i3-2120
$180: Core i5-2310
$200: Core i5-3450
$230: Core i5-3570K
$590: Core i7-3930K

Sadly, the best desktop CPU AMD has to offer is bested by the lowly Core i3, and is crushed by any of the Core i5s.

AMD boards have better PCI-E lanes then intel chip

[Joe_Dragon]

AMD boards have better PCI-E lanes then intel chips.

With Intel you need to go high end to get more then 16 lanes + DMI

Re:it's the boards!

[Osgeld]

I just got a gigabyte with dual PCI-e 4 ram slots (1833 and if you OC it a little 2000) with all the latest buzzwords for like 70 bucks ... you need to shop some more

In Linux drivers, Intel is still king.

[BadgerRush]

AMD may be getting its shit together when in regards to chip design. but I'm still going Intel on my next PC because of their superior Linux drivers. At the moment I'm an unhappy owner of a laptop with a AMD graphics card that can't do anything because the drivers are useless. I'm looking forward to a new laptop with an Intel Ivy Bridge processor (I don't think I can wait Haskell).

Re:In Linux drivers, Intel is still king.

[thue]

While AMD is releasing documentation, Intel is releasing actual open source drivers. And now that Intel's graphics hardware is no longer a complete joke, Intel is becoming a real alternative for some users.

AMD is still better than NVIDIA, which doesn't release documentation.

Re:AMD boards have better PCI-E lanes then intel c

[smash]

The thing is, the low end don't care for masses of PCI lanes. They run integrated video. The high end want a fast CPU as well.

AMD's in deep trouble with Steamroller

[PhrostyMcByte]

I think AMD's work here will provide some great evolutionary speedups that will be significant to many people. Unfortunately for them, at the same time AMD is bringing out these small "free lunch" general improvements, Intel will be bringing out Haswell -- which in addition to such evolutionary improvements has some really fantastic, significant new features that'll provide remarkable performance boosts.

• Integer AVX-256. For apps that can take advantage of it, this'll be a massive speed-up. Things like x264 and other video processing will take huge advantage of this.
• SIMD LUTs. One of the major optimization tricks programmers have been using for ages, look up tables, have been thus far out of reach to SIMD code without complex shuffle operations that usually aren't worth it.
• Transactional memory. This is not quite the easy BEGIN/COMMIT utopia people are hoping transactional memory will eventually get us, but it's a building block that'll enable some advanced concurrent algorithms that either aren't realistic now or are so complex that they're out of reach to most coders.

These are all pretty specialized features, yes, but they service some very high-profile benchmark areas: video processing and concurrency are always on the list, and AMD will get absolutely crushed when apps start taking advantage of it.

I'm a developer, a major optimization geek both micro- and macro-. I thrive playing with instruction latencies, execution units, and cache usage until my code eeks out as much performance as possible. Of course we'll never know until the CPUs are released for everyone to play with, but right now my money is on Intel.

AMD is in serious trouble here. I hope I'm wrong.

Re:AMD's in deep trouble with Steamroller

[VortexCortex]

I'm a developer, a major optimization geek both micro- and macro-. I thrive playing with instruction latencies, execution units, and cache usage until my code eeks out as much performance as possible. Of course we'll never know until the CPUs are released for everyone to play with, but right now my money is on Intel.

Yeah, I'm a developer too. However, my simulations run on desktops not super computers so it doesn't matter how optimal the code is on a single particular piece of hardware... Wake me up when there's a cross platform intermediary "object code" I can distribute that gets optimised and linked/compiled at installation time for the exact hardware my games will be running on.

We need software innovation (OS's and Compilers) otherwise I'm coding tons of cases for specific hardware features that aren't available on every platform, and are outpaced by the doubly powerful machine that comes out 18 months later... In short: It's not worth doing all that code optimisation for each and every chip released. This is also why Free Software is so nice: I release the cross platform source code, you compile it, and it's optimised for your hardware... However, most folks actually just download the generic architecture binary, defeating the per processor optimisation benefits.

Like I said: In addition to hardware improvements we need a better cross platform intermediary binary format (so that both closed and open projects benefit). You know, kind of like how Android's Davlik bytecode works (processed at installation), except without needing a VM when you're done. I've got one of my toy languages doing this, but it requires a compiler/interpreter to be already installed (which is fine for me, but in general suffers the same problems as Java). MS is going with .NET, but that's some slow crap in terms of "high-performance" and still uses a VM.

Besides, I thought it was rule #2: Never optimise prematurely?
(I guess the exception is: Unless you're only developing for yourself...)

Re:AMD's in deep trouble with Steamroller

[lightknight]

*Looks around* AAAAAAAnd, how does this AVX-256 compare to OpenCl transcoding of video?

Re:it's the boards!

[bhcompy]

I got my Asus SATA3/USB3/Firewire2 AM2+/AM3 board in 2010 for $85, so I have no fucking idea what you're talking about.

And an average user would care because?

[Sycraft-fu]

Sorry but lots of PCIe lanes are just not the kind of thing that matters to non-high end users or people who focus on stats rather than real world performance. To even have a situation on a desktop board where it could theoretically matter you have to have multiple graphics cards. The 1x slots hang off the southbridge and have their own bandwidth separate from the lanes on the CPU for the video card. So if you stick on two GPUs then yes, you don't have enough to give them both 16 lanes.

However it turns out to not matter. We have more bandwidth than we need with PCIe, particularly now with 3.0. You test a card in 16x vs one in 8x and you find no difference in performance. So it just doesn't matter even if you have multiple GPUs.

Of course multiple GPUs are rather a high end proposition. Many people don't even bother with a GPU at all, they just use the onboard graphics which these days are surprisingly good (I've played with the integrated graphics on my new Ivy Bridge laptop since it has switchable graphics and for many games, you don't need anything more). Even those that do choose to have addon GPUs, most choose just one. I've got a GTX 680 in my desktop and there is just no need for anything more, it handles all games superbly. I'd have to move up to multiple surround monitors or something before I'd start needing more than one GPU.

So it is a situation where you only end up needing more lanes in a high end environment, thus I don't see the big deal in not having them. It is the kind of thing you won't notice.

Re:What are you talking about?

[lightknight]

+10 for being pedantic (the best kind of correct, technically correct), -1000 for knowing exactly what I was groping for, but choosing to be pedantic.

Just got back from a late-night concert, and my head hasn't stopped pounding yet (and there is some question of sobriety -> Jimmy Buffet with margaritas). Besides, and I am summoning my inner BOFH here, who teh f*ck would run OpenCl code on a CPU? I've tried, and the only thing I've succeeded in doing is giving my laptop a grand mal seizure.

And no one sane does video-transcoding on a 7-year old machine. No, no, just don't go there.

And ponying up an extra $500 on top of the regular CPU going rate ($200-300) for a new chip, from Intel, when a $150 four-generation displaced video card could / would spank it is a thought not even worth considering. But I digress, someone out there will decide that running a video transcoder, on a non-upgradeable laptop (which they will pay way too much money for this chip), with Intel HD integrated graphics (does it even support OpenCl? Is it still a separate chipset, or has it been integrated on-die?), and absolutely need this feature; they will also probably save the processed video onto a 4,000 RPM USB-1 portable value hard drive.

Comments subject to revision if / when I wake up tomorrow, and shake off that last of this Tequila. I think it's Tequila.

Re:AMD boards have better PCI-E lanes then intel c

[Z34107]

What kind of workload needs more than 16 PCIe lanes, but doesn't similarly need a higher-end processor?

One more reason why APU in the high end is stupid

[Lonewolf666]

Personally I thought the whole idea was retarded except for the mobile chips like Brazos, on the desktop the idea was completely stupid and on the server even more so. For those that don't know the original plan was to go "Full APU" and have the GPU take the place of the FP on chip, which would be a much simpler and weaker design than in years past thus freeing up more TDP for more cores. Why is this dumb? Well what if you want to use the GPU AND do some floating point heavy task? Or what if you don't want the integrated GPU because you can't OC worth a crap with the GPU built in?

All correct, but I could live with those aspects. I usually don't OC, and if I know I want the GPU AND do some floating point heavy task, I could get an additional discrete GPU. There is, however, a worse one:

Memory bandwidth congestion. A typical lower midrange graphics card with 128 bit data bus and GDDR3 is significantly slower than the same model with GDDR5. In an APU, the GPU part has to share the even lower bandwidth of the DDR3 main memory with the CPU part.

When the LLano was new, Anandtech published a preview:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4448/amd-llano-desktop-performance-preview
It shows some comparisons to discrete graphics cards, including the HD 5570 which represents the lower midrange graphics card w/128bit mentioned above.
In gaming frame rates, the HD 5570 beats the LLano even when it runs on DDR3-1866 RAM, which was not a JEDEC standard at the time. With standard DDR3, the difference gets bigger. Which shows clearly the LLano is limited by memory bandwidth and really could use four-channel memory as in Intel's socket 2011.
With bigger and faster GPUs, the bandwidth demands will only grow, and for a Bulldozer APU with matching GPU part even four-channel memory may be insufficient..

Re:What are you talking about?

[FreonTrip]

Heads up: The x264 project's incorporating OpenCL support for certain parts of the encoder. Take a look over here - initial results are very promising.

Re:What are you talking about?

[Atzanteol]

+10 for being pedantic (the best kind of correct, technically correct), -1000 for knowing exactly what I was groping for, but choosing to be pedantic.

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