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AMD Sued Over Allegedly Misleading Bulldozer Core Count
An anonymous reader writes: A class action suit accuses AMD of misleading buyers about the number of cores in its Bulldozer-based CPUs. The complaint claims that the chips effectively had only four cores, while AMD claims there are eight. According to Ars: "AMD's multi-core Bulldozer chips use a unique design that combines the functions of what would normally be two discrete cores into a single package, which the company calls a module. Each module is identified as two separate cores in Windows, but the cores share a single floating point unit and instruction and execution resources. This is different from Intel's cores, which feature independent FPUs. The suit claims that Bulldozer's design means its cores cannot work independently, and as a result, cannot perform eight instructions simultaneously and independently. This, the claim continues, results in performance degradation, and average consumers in the market for a CPU lack the technical expertise to understand the design of AMD's processors and trust the company to give accurate specifications regarding its CPUs."
My i5 is ID'd as a 4-core device. Windows shows it that way. But it's two cores. Hyperthreading or something.
What's up with that?
AMD is a joke. You can buy an i5 and slightly overclock it to be faster than one of their top of the line FX-8350 cpus.
Intel has a lot to learn from its smaller rival's marketing department :)
The sooner AMD goes down the toilet, the sooner someone competent takes over, the sooner Intel and Nvidia get competitive again.
At the moment, consumers and society as a whole are suffering from this beating of a dead horse. We need its death accelerated to the whole industry back on its toes again.
Get your Friday news on Sunday!
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/217672-analysis-amd-lawsuit-over-false-bulldozer-chip-marketing-is-without-merit
And as everybody knows, twice the cores equals twice the performance.
Why is this even reported? This suit isn't going to go anywhere (unless AMD's lawyers are extremely incompetent, and the judge is extremely incapable of understanding basics about computer architecture and ISAs).
The AMD cores shared an FPU, sure, but sharing a resource doesn't mean that cores cannot execute simultaneously. The AMD cores still have independent integer-based execution units (instruction registers, register files, ALUs, branch counters, etc.), after all, and are fully capable of executing integer instructions simultaneously (which accounts for the vast majority of instructions under typical loading).
"Is not a sentence" is not a sentence. Well damn.
At least their marketing is honest: a bulldozer is a very slow vehicle!
I was shopping for VCRs about 20 years back and asked the Future Shop guy how much better it was for having (quoting from the card beside the VCR) a "19 micron tape head". Turns out they ALL had 19 micron tape-heads (whatever the hell that *meant*) as it was the spec for a VCR tape head, at the time, at least. It was just another bit of science-y sounding technobabble to put on the card.
Buying based on core count is like buying for the 19-micron thing; it's either a fast machine for your purposes or not. Absolutely the only way to tell that for sure is a test. The only thing that was ever useful with, say, "megahertz" was that it had for a decade or so there a correlation with the performance you'd get in real use. I've never found "cores" to have anything of the sort.
A judge is likely to ask : Were there 8 cores ? If the answer is yes, which it seems to be , then AMD is in the clear.
No multi-core CPU box ever came with a statement that all 8 cores would be capable of processing instructions in parallel at the same time. It does however mean, that AMDs 8-core is significantly worse than Intel's 8-core.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
it's not false advertising. the cores feature separate integer units. that's good enough to call each module two separate cores. the FPU is actually an add-on processor to the integer unit.
what matters here is not what is the specs but the performance of the unit. so because the performance of the hardware was not misrepresented, and because the characteristics of the CPU were represented finely, this lawsuit is basically a farce attempt to attack or extract money from AMD.
everyone was well aware of the CPUs performance from the day it was released because of mass publications that analyzed the CPU performance and published the performance results, showing it beat the equivalent Intel design in some cases but mostly offering lackluster performance in comparison. this has always been known about recently AMD CPUs, that they do not perform the same as Intel CPUs and feature drastically different designs.
I fail to see the claim to damages here .. at all. It seems more like a thinking error on the part of the filer, believing that "two cores" had to mean the same thing as they personally wanted to believe it meant .. In all advertisements for AMD's designs, it's plainly laid out the design of the Bulldozer architecture, and that the units feature two integer units and one shared FPU resource. I'm not aware of any advertisement that ever said differently.
http://www.obamasweapon.com/ http://www.drrobertduncan.com/
You're right! They're a joke! Hopefully they go bankrupt so you can buy an i5 for the price of a Xeon!
Soooo Can I sue Intel / Amd / Cyrix for providing 386 chips with no integrated math co-processor, housing that functionality in the 387?
I mean, if you bought a 3.5GHz chip and it didn't perform as fast as an Intel 3.5GHz it must be misleading marketing, right? We all know that clock speed is all that matters when you compare a chip. And, I've been told, that they may be reducing clock speed dynamically when the processor isn't fully loaded - basically cheating you out of the speed you PAID for. I hear AMD also ran over your cat.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Regardless of how many cores you have, 90% of the crap that 90% of people do doesn't even benefit from having more than two cpu cores, and it only benefits from that because you can use one core for "the app you're running in the foreground" and one core for literally all other background tasks so your system doesn't lock up if you really need to use 100% of a core, AMD can throw more cores at their CPUs but end users won't see real world performance benefits except in limited scenarios. Intel's super cheap Pentium G3220 at 3ghz (and with only two cores) beats everything AMD sells except for hand-picked benchmarks where AMD's core advantage overcomes its brutal per-clock disadvantage. Single threaded performance is whats king and you'd have to run an AMD cpu at like 5ghz to overcome its poor performance per clock to beat a 3ghz Intel (core-architecture) CPU. And its sad for me to say this because I bought nothing but AMD CPUs from like 2000 until 2014. I wish they could be competetive but the situation looks pretty bleak. I can't use their stuff when their 8 core 4.5ghz cpu is only "a little bit faster" than my 4 core 3ghz phenom from 2009, but my i7 4790k is like, a solid 3 times faster than that 2009 phenom in almost anything you throw at it.
Is this the same AMD "8-core" device that's in both PS-4 and Xbox One consoles?
If so, the consequences may go much wider than this story makes it appear!
-- Steve
www.sjbaker.org
I guess you missed the part where AMD was advertising these things as 8 core when in reality it's only 8 integer units and 4 floating point units.
I own one of the Trinity series processors with the same design, (four cores, with two shared FPUs) and my understanding is that you can run four threads on it, but only two can use floating point manipulation at a time. Since processes like game physics threads can't always be subdivided, only running one or two processes using FPUs is not such a big deal.You can still run other non-FP operations at full steam, like compiling software on make -j4. If you need to run massive parallel FP manipulation (open simulator grid, protein folding, etc.), then you probably should be running server processors anyway... or better yet, use the GPU.
I facepalmed at the mention of how Intel allegedly doesn't do this... does anybody remember HyperThreading? :-P
Other companies make CPUs. Even if AMD were to die off and Intel was the only maker of x86 (which they still wouldn't thanks to VIA), Intel would still have to be competitive with ARM.
AMD has been doing this for a long time. They always hide the truth and try real hard to count HT cores as real ones in their marketing.
Honestly they need to stop being allowed to advertise "cores" if they are not honest to goodness real separate processor cores.
I hope AMD loses HARD on this and forces the industry to stop being misleading assholes.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You are all...never mind.
Better late than never! And I'm speaking as an ex-AMD fanboy who did the Duron conductive paint trick, but got burned with 760MP. After that, never bought another AMD product again.
I hope they get burned!
Good point. It's one thing to base it on MHz, which usually was a good indicator of relative speed within a CPU architecture (even though a 150MHz Alpha was slower than a 150MHz Pentium). It's another thing to base it on #cores, since it's well known that parallelism in CPUs is hard to extract, in which case, beyond 4 CPUs, one is quickly hitting the point of diminishing returns.
Also, to what extent have the loads on Floating point units changed? I recall that in the 90s, FPUs used to be heavily de-emphasized, due to the fact that then versions of Windows were very light on it. In fact, NexGen - one of the companies that AMD acquired - excluded them altogether, while if you needed high floating point performances, you went w/ RISC - Alpha, PA-RISC or Power. Today, people use GPUs for any floating point intensive firepower that may be needed, so that begs the question - how critical is it to have a high performance floating point unit for every core in the CPU?
Cant be, as the PS4 and Xbox One use Puma derived cores, a completely different Architecture than the Buldozer derived Desktop CPU.
The Puma Cores do NOT share the FPU. Puma CPU use a special low power Design that doesn`t scale up well above about 2 GHz
AMD dying off would effectively make Intel the sole producer of high-performance x86/64 CPUs in the market. Sure, you have VIA as well, but good luck trying to crunch numbers on an C7 core.
No, blame AMD. They were doing the same thing as Intel is doing with Hyperthreading (scheduling two cores worth of instructions on one actual physical core), just they were claiming that that meant it had twice as many cores, rather than being honest that it's a trick to get more efficiency out of one core.
They've got nothing on NVIDIA, who advertise the GTX 980 as having 2048 "cores", when by any standard definition it only has 16 (or if you're really generous, you could maybe argue it has 64, but that's pushing it). They count every lane of their vector unit as a separate core. By that standard, AMD (and Intel) should multiply all their core counts by 8, since each AVX unit can do 8 int or float operations at once.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
You realize x86-64, the architecture nearly every PC uses was made by AMD, right?
Intel doesn't want AMD to die off because that would subject its practices to monopoly scrutiny. It shares just enough patent information with AMD to allow it to trail a bit behind (in exchange for access to AMD patents, of course) and not completely collapse. The one time that AMD managed to move ahead of Intel (when the Athlon was the king of the hill), Intel pulled out all the stops to prevent it getting a solid foothold in the PC market until Intel's Core 2 Duo could come along and put Intel technologically back in the lead. AMD hasn't had the money to effectively compete since then in part because Intel ensured that its bank accounts couldn't build up too far.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
I don't see how this issue can affect PS-4 and Xbox One consoles. Both those are marketed with out disclosure to the public on how many cores their processors have. Most people that buy games consoles don't care about that as long as their a radical performance increase over their last console.
I doubt that ether microsoft or sony will have anything to say ether. Both their engineering teams crawled all over the cpu designs they where planning to put in the console. They didn't just point at a cpu and said that one is good. They knew exactly what they where putting into those consoles.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
I built a few workstations a few years back out of those VIA parts. God what a piece of shit. These where for low end office work too. We couldn't get off those things fast enough.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
If slow processors get the work done fast enough, and they allow the device to be smaller, generate less heat, and run longer on a given mass of battery, then I'll take the slow processors.
"The suit claims that Bulldozer's design means its cores cannot work independently, and as a result, cannot perform eight instructions simultaneously and independently."
If the suit really makes this claim it is easy for AMD to defend, because an AMD Bulldozer with 4 modules / 8 cores can actually execute 8 independent floating point instructions per cycle.
The two cores in each module share the floating point units, but each module contains 2 independent 128-bit FMAC units. Floating point throughput could be even higher, if both cores would have their own 2 128-bit FMACs, but would likely be lower if AMD decided to go with a single 128-bit FMAC per core. Sharing the floating point units allows higher execution speeds within the same area, as in most cases only one core is currently executing FPU instructions and that core can reach a higher speed with 2 execution units vs. one.
Jan
I wish to file a class-action lawsuit to the entire drone industry. I have purchased several drones. None of these drones have the capability of an actual drone. My understanding is that a drone can fly itself. This is false marketing and misleading to customers!
I understand they're very popular on the embedded market due to their low cost, but i can't honestly tell why. Any half decent ARM platform will run circles around it.
If Intel were to raise prices on their x86 CPUs, people would just move to ARM or MIPS.
I was shopping for VCRs about 20 years back and asked the Future Shop guy how much better it was for having (quoting from the card beside the VCR) a "19 micron tape head". Turns out they ALL had 19 micron tape-heads (whatever the hell that *meant*) as it was the spec for a VCR tape head, at the time, at least. It was just another bit of science-y sounding technobabble to put on the card.
Buying based on core count is like buying for the 19-micron thing; it's either a fast machine for your purposes or not. Absolutely the only way to tell that for sure is a test. The only thing that was ever useful with, say, "megahertz" was that it had for a decade or so there a correlation with the performance you'd get in real use. I've never found "cores" to have anything of the sort.
When I went apartment-hunting five years ago, one of the buildings was advertising its unit features to include polarized plugs. And auto-defrost refrigerators.
You know, in case you had been living in 1950.
is garbage. End of story.
That's fine, as most serious computing is not done with FPU at all.
It's fine? Compared to a dual core Haswel with 16 integer units. They don't say it's a 16 core CPU
No, it is not fine for AMD to blatantly lie about what they are selling. If they call it an 8 core CPU, it better well have 8 cores, not 8 partial cores.
Until someone tries to play a game that has a physics engine that isn't OpenCL. PhysX on a system with an AMD CPU and GPU can only use the CPU for calculations, which is already slow enough.
both AMD and Intel have their specs publicly known, and moreover there are benchmarks that actually do a good job of pointing out those architectural differences. I'll bet you three-quarters of the public don't buy on any of that, they buy a whole system for a certain price...heck even at one major chain they usually don't even put the amount of RAM on the description cards! You're saying the kind of numb-from-the-neck-up buying public should have some concern and worry over marketing hype, distortion, and buzzwords that are blasted at them? nah, fuck 'em. anyone who wants to do real research, even a ten year old kid, has the truth out there for the taking.
And that makes AMD CPUs powerful how?
You also seem to forget that Intel created the x86 architecture from which x86-64 is based. Without them AMD would have disappeared long ago.
It's also ridiculous that you think Intel couldn't have come up with a 64-bit x86 architecture by themselves. Intel's R&D department absolutely puts AMD's to shame.
They made one and it sucked so much that they gave up on it and used AMD's.
Err except with HT there is one execution unit, and with AMD there are two.
They are real cores, that share instruction decode and a FPU.
Actual execution is parallel (unlike HT which is more interleaved).
HT isn't similar to Bulldozer modules in any sense.
You can make all of the excuse you want but false advertising is still false advertising. That is why AMD is being sued and why this very story exists.
I actually prefer to buy AMD. I've got plenty of money but I might as well save it. I tend to buy a lot, an absurd amount actually, of hardware over a single year - often just to use it for a short time and play with it. I may keep that hardware or I may just donate it to the local elementary school's computer lab at the end of the school year (so it's in place for the next year). Why AMD? I get more than enough bang for the buck. I'm not a gamer so I don't even buy high end graphics cards. I'm content with an older GPU, even one a couple of generations (or more) back.
I no longer do any compute intensive work. The little that I do really doesn't need to be quick, I'm not in a rush. I don't really notice much of a speed difference any more. The vast majority of time everything runs just fine. Hell, I don't even bother installing an OS oftentimes. I'll just use a USB drive and boot from that. It's not like I'm lacking in RAM or compute power. If I've got an installed OS then chances are pretty good that it's just a host and that I'm running a VM. With an SSD, a quad core, and just 16 GB of RAM then I'm pretty much good to go - regardless of who made the CPU. I just don't need anything faster and I don't really do anything where the difference shows.
I also find that AMD seems to play nicer with the varied distros. I'm not talking about policy or code being open or whatnot. I'm talking about it just working without my needing to fuck with anything. It's not that I don't mind poking and learning but I've done enough of that with CPU architectures in the past. I'm learning new and different things and AMD helps me do that. I've experienced more issues with Intel CPUs than I have with AMD CPUs when using Linux as my OS. These days, that doesn't seem to matter nearly as much but I suppose it might be salient.
*shrugs* I get more than enough horsepower from AMD. I tend to buy whiteboxes with AMD CPUs and even usually get laptops with AMDs in them because they're "good enough" for my needs. I do have a nice new laptop with a shiny new Intel in it, it wasn't an accident but wasn't really a primary concern. I do admit that it's pretty snappy but, again, I don't really note much of a difference between it and a five year old laptop or at least I don't recollect much of a difference. Hardware's fast enough. The only reason I buy new hardware is to play with new configurations, break things in new and interesting ways, and to just waste time and money doing something different for a little while.
I have a couple of towers, back home, that are still sitting in their boxes. Those do have a dedicated purpose, I tell myself, but there are already PCs in their way. One is going to get an extra pair of NICs and connect to a hub and become a new firewall with pfsense and the other is going to make a new storage array - I'm going to remove the optical drive and fill it up with spinning platter drives and one SSD. The eventual goal is to keep it isolated from external access while allowing neighbors to access it for file sharing and off-site backup. I'll probably find some attached storage to add to it if it turns out that it gets any use.
I've also been thinking of offering them some sort of cloud hosting - where they can spin up a VM and connect to do any one of a few things - I'll probably see if there's any interest with the aforementioned elementary school. I'm thinking that I can do a small server and they can spin up Edubuntu and Scratch and have a pre-set image and then just store their data locally at their site as well as retain backups here in my basement/server closet. Mostly, I just want to play with the tech because being retired means that I get to do that.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I run at least 5 VMs on it. And they all run all the time (in addition to the host OS). It also took some initial effort to unpark every other core. Which means cores 2,4,6,8 can be parked independently of their cousins. AMD chips are better for running VMs, while Intel chips are better at running games. I couldn't run 5 VM's on Intel 5 (4 cores with hyperthreading). The actual CPU count is 8 on the AMD chip. You don't need an FPU to run basic operating system threads themselves. It also has more symmetric caching. Whereas Intel's caching is clearly geared at increasing the speed up of each running core.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Isn't four years too long to bring suit for this?
I avoid AMD because of bad performance, incompatibility and driver issues. It's worth the extra cash for Intel and Nvidia because there are far less problems with them.
When did Intel create a 64-bit x86 architecture that sucked so much that they gave up on it and used AMD's?
Itanium isn't x86. Try again.
Some ARM processors don't have a FPU. Are they lying blatantly when they claim to have more than zero cores?
and Juries are really, really unpredictable. Even if the outcome is legally obvious it doesn't mean the jury won't get dazzled into blaming AMD.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
In modern times? Yes. The FPU has been an integral part of most CPUs since the 486.
And you realize that the architecture and engineering teams that conceived that ISA are largely at other companies now. Doesn't mean that the teams currently at AMD can't work some impressive designs, but venerating a company because of something people accomplished a decade ago while employed there is, well, naive, I think.
If you're a consumer, you can't base your buying decision based on a single specification. You have to look at your needs vs what is important to you. For some people performance/$ is important. For others, performance $/watt is more important. You have to compare based on the applications that are important to you. If you, as a typical desktop/laptop user, mostly use application A and price is the main consideration, it doesn't matter if the CPU runs at 3 or 4 GHz, 4 threads or 8 threads, etc. What matters is performance/$. If you have $200 to spend on a cpu, it really doesn't matter who makes the better $700 cpu.
There are plenty of resources available to help people make decisions. Only relying on marketing department information is just plain dumb.
The issue is not whether the slashdot crowd (or similarly geared crowd) understands the technical specifics but whether or not the average consumer who only understands "more is better, bigger is better".
Who cares if the average slashdot geek understands the difference between a "core" and a "module". The underlying affect is misinformation and seemingly false advertising.
I am sure much like VW this will turn out to be the work of a single rogue engineer.
Less problems with Nvidia? What galaxy do you live in? I just switched back to Nvidia and well I can say I wish to hell I had stayed with ATI.
Eight instruction can, in fact, be executed simultaneously. Run a parallel CompletableFuture task or something, and this becomes extremely obvious. Each parallel "run" use a ClassTransformer to see the ASM instructions being run with a locking (NOT a re-entrant lock) counter, and a \n every 8 locks/unlocks.
You will see 8 ASM instructions at a time.
That being said...physically they aren't cores, and shouldn't be referred to as such. They should have referred to them with their own term "module." If they didn't...they should be sued.
AMD has 8 full integer cores in there. HT gives you one full and one 40% core (at best). This gives you 8 as long as you do integer loads. For float-loads things are different, but AMD never hid that at all. And it is not so long ago that floating-point units came as external add-on.
Incidentally, the complaint is self-contradictory, as a non-expert cannot interpret a number like "8 cores" either as these may be slow or fast cores and have different architectures. The only thing a non-expert can go by is benchmarks, and AMD did not lie on any of them.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
And it is not so long ago that floating-point units came as external add-on.
You mean 26 years ago?
Most of the people who have problems running games have an AMD GPU. Nvidia just works.
There is not only AMD64 in the world. But what would an idiot like you know.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Since the dx... Sx still didn't have a FPU
You mean purchased from DEC (Digital)
You realize that AMD and Intel have a cross-licensing agreement, so its completely moot who came up with it. If your point was to show AMD somehow is a superior CPU manufacturer, well thats just not supported by the facts. There was a time when AMD came close to parity with Intel, but that was more Intel mis-stepping than AMD's prowess.
Good-bye
The fact that, years later, _WE_ are still arguing about this proves that the case has merit.
If WE can't come to a consensus about this... then how is Joe Scmoe supposed to figure it out?
The fact is: this was _misleading_ advertising. They could have easily come up with another name for it (like Intel did with Hyperthreads)... instead they consciously chose to call the extra ALUs _cores_... which does have a meaning to the typical consumer. They did this, on purpose, to muddy the waters... and they REALLY did.
Does that mean that people shouldn't be more careful about what they buy? Sure. But that doesn't absolve AMD from putting out misleading advertising.
That wasn't my point, I never even implied that, I have zero brand loyalty and would have no problem buying a Via CPU if they somehow made one worth using.
Probably because if you need an x86 chip, you're not going to use an ARM?
The point being, most embedded applications don't need x86.
Everyone is so bent out of shape over a marketing gimmick that isn't relatable to the average consumer. Sure a few people may have been burned for not doing their due diligence, but isn't this honestly a repeat of common corporate behavior? I once contested the 4G cellular branding to anyone that would listen. And unsurprisingly no one really cares. The average person is more concerned with the experience than the details. The knowledgeable consumer should have earned the title and researched the processor they were buying.
If you need x86 in a embedded application you should look at a atom processor.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
In a completely synthetic benchmark, I recall the 8300 being double the speed of the 4300 and the 6300 coming in right in the middle. So I guess their theoretical limitation and pretend core complaint is just that, theoretical. Oh and also it's bullshit.
The 486DX was the first 486 CPU released.
But what would an idiot like you know.
Project much?
Let me educate you. The 486DX was released in 1989. It had an integrated FPU and following its release, most CPUs had FPUs built-in.
I guess you didn't have a computer back then or perhaps you weren't even born yet.
But as parent said there is not only x86 architectures.
No. Consoles are based on jaguar.
I've always preferred to use the following to describe the Intel architectures: (# arbitrary parallel processes) + (possible # additional parallel processes).
For most i7's that's a 4+4 core CPU. The i5 is either a 2+2 or 4+0, and so on. I'd think these new AMD offerings would be in the 4+4 range, although this description doesn't indicate how often a workload can satisfy the requirement. I'm sure we could complicate it by adding a percentage at the end or something, i.e. 4+4x.75 (75% of the common workloads have the equivalent of 8 cores). You'd think the industry could adopt this (or a similar) approach.
Come now AC, I suspect you are being intentionally obtuse. Of course Intel could have come up with some sort of 64 bit x86 architecture by themselves (if they cared about their installed base and had actually wanted to); but as you said, they already had the IA-64 monstrosity. AMD did us all the service of providing an acceptable alternative to Intel's plan of forced obsolescence. And, technically, AMD64 turned out pretty well, not sure IA-64 would have done the same as the only desktop\server ISA as it looked like things were headed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"AMD64 was created as an alternative to the radically different IA-64 architecture, [by Intel and HP]. [...] AMD64 architecture was positioned by AMD from the beginning as an evolutionary way to add 64-bit computing capabilities to the existing x86 architecture, as opposed to Intel's approach of creating an entirely new 64-bit architecture with IA-64."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"but with x86-64, roles were reversed: Intel found itself in the position of adopting the ISA which AMD had created as an extension to Intel's own x86 processor line. [...Yamhill] After several years of denying its existence, Intel announced at the February 2004 IDF that the project was indeed underway"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"[...] Intel had originally hoped [Itanium] would find broader acceptance as a replacement for the original x86 architecture.
AMD chose a different direction, designing the less radical x86-64, a 64-bit extension to the existing x86 architecture, which Microsoft then supported, forcing Intel to introduce the same extensions in its own x86-based processors.[15] These designs can run existing 32-bit applications at native hardware speed, while offering support for 64-bit memory addressing and other enhancements to new applications.[6] This architecture has now become the predominant 64-bit architecture in the desktop and portable market."
I'm still waiting for a PC that can blast process like my old Genesis.
The FX-8350 is not their "top of the line" processor.It's about 15% slower than the FX-9590. And the fastest i5 is the 5675C, to my knowledge, which is about 75% the speed of the FX-9590 and $100 more expensive. It takes a lot more than a "slight overclock" to add an extra 25% speed. In most cases you can't accomplish that with an overclock, even with a 40% clock boost, because performance doesn't scale with frequency that way in CPUs.
Translation: Bad deal, financially.
Yeah, the FX-9590 isn't great for power efficiency, it's not as fast as the newest generation i7s, but for a huge number of workloads it is as fast as an i7-4770k which is $200 more. And that $200 not only buys me a hell of a cooling unit but also pays for a 480GB SSD.
And unless you get a braindead game like battlefield, the difference for an i3, and i7, and the goofy AMD A series CPUs is something like 2 FPS. I'm guessing that since you are talking about overclocking that you aren't using it for business, since it pretty regularly leads to stability problems, so you're probably a gamer and you're probably paying an extra $400 for crap that makes no difference at all every time you buy a new computer. Great job buddy!
Yeah, because if you have a super simple program that you can run on a $7 Via CPU you should totally look at the $65 intel design instead!
No, he specifically said "AMD64" which didn't exist in silicon until 2003.
The FX 9590 is an eight core CPU with a TDP of 220W while the i5 5675C is quad core with a TDP of 65W. Four extra cores and 155W more for a 20% speed increase is ridiculous, if it's even truly faster.
Take a look at this. As you can see, the FX 9590 gets its ass handed to it in more than half of the benchmarks vs the i5 4690. It even sometimes loses to the i3 4360.
The discussion was never about Itanium. Stop trying to move goalposts.
I doubt that. ARM and MIPS chips are optimized for high energy efficiency and low price point, not high performance. A top of the line ARM Cortex-A57 performs about the same as an Intel Silvermont Atom.
Jan
Yes. I did some quick research looking for that $7 VIA cpu. I didn't find it. What I did find was the specs for current VIA CPU's. From what I read they are worse than AMD. S
So the choice between cheap crap and a reliable working system? You see cost alone doesn't just always seal the deal. Spend the extra money and get quality.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
no, those use AMD's low power Bobcat cores. Bulldozer is supposed to be faster per clock, but use more electricity.
Sony and Microsoft decided to pick small, low-power cores, clock them at 1.7GHz to reduce the power use, and pack as many GPU cores as they could fit.
So glad someone is finally suing AMD for this BS! A 4 core CPU does not equal an 8 core CPU simply because AMD feels like calling it one! 2 ALU + 1 FPU equals a single core CPU, not a dual core. There are lots of CPU's out there that have multiple ALU's, but are single core. If AMD had included a additional FPU unit per core and not shared them because each other, then yes, otherwise NO! AMD just keeps on shooting itself in the foot.
AMD64 isn't x86 either. They are RISC CPUs that run a complicated compatibilty layer that lets them run CISC x86 code. At the hardware level they have more in common with SPARC or MIPS than the old 386-686 line of CPUs.
Sort of like the old ALPHA chips did with FX!32, only a bit better because it's their primary focus.
The Itaniums tried that too, they just sucked at it. And in general. Dvorak went so far as to say that the Itanium "Killed the computer industry"
And the fact remains, Intel's 64bit implementation sucked compared to ALPHA, UltraSPARC, MIPS, or PowerPC. Itanium was meant to be the next stage after IA-32, it was meant to replace x86 because x86 is a horrible instruction set. But it didn't because everything Intel made during those years was shit, and the only reason they didn't go bankrupt is because they spent decades on dishonest marketing.
I have an AMD FX-8350. Technically, it's a piledriver, which is one iteration newer than a bulldozer, but it's the same chip.
The only thing these CPUs do better than Intel CPUs is run truly parallel tasks, because you're getting literally 8 cores, no hyperthreading.
As I recall, there are two cores per "module" and they share a few things (I looked it up in 2012 but I've long since forgotten the details) but claiming they are not actual real cores is complete fucking idiocy.
i7s run circles around these things, but given that the cost difference, I'd expect them to.
Which is the same reason Microsoft cedes a certain fraction of market share to Apple. They want them to be significant enough to claim that MSFT isn't a monopoly, but not a dollar bigger.
Wrong. The best ARM CPUs rival Core i5 in performance.
AMD64 is an extension of x86.
My 2007 laptop has a K8 based Turion64X2 CPU. It was competitive with the C2D on performance, and the nVidia Geforce Go 7200 graphics beat the Intel 945 series (for a laptop). Though like a lot of nVidia chips from the era, it has a tendency of delaminating from the motherboard, and HP released a BIOS update that runs the fan continuously, and the Wifi stopped working 5 years ago because of it.
I later bought an AMD K8 based Neo netbook with ATI/AMD x1200 graphics, which beat the Atom N270/N280 and GMA945.
Neither of these chips were great energy savers, but performance per dollar was hard to beat.
A year ago I set out to replace the Turion laptop with a desktop for daily usage. I'm not a gamer, though I wanted it to be capable of playing HD videos, encoding videos, running VMs, etc.
I wanted to justify AMD as the underdog, but in the end I couldn't deny the Haswell based i5-4690 beat the AMD offerings. For ordinary usage (eg even web browsing), single core performance is more important than many give it credit for (especially once you pass the 2-4 core boundary). Intel smokes AMD in single thread performance, and unless you regularly run heavy multithread loads, the i5 beats the i7 in cost. On video the Haswell isn't bad for desktop usage, and I can even run 3x 1080 screens (1x HDMI, 1x DVI, 1x VGA).
As my username may suggest I'm no Linux pundit, but I was always under the impression that Intel video had better Linux support compared to either nVidia or AMD.
I don't game so I'm usually not bothering to stay near the bleeding edge with video cards. I can't really say. In my experience, however, anything that I do actually want to do is 'fast enough.' I watch documentaries. I don't even watch them so much as listen to them. Graphics aren't even all that essential. I can play HD and I do have a 4k monitor at home (several, technically) and those all work fine but the GPUs will all be about two years old by now, I imagine. I don't even own a BluRay device. Well, I don't have one hooked up. I did buy a write capable drive to store data but that turned out to be slow and, frankly, I already had better media storage options.
I could be fairly unique in my use patterns. *shrugs* So, there's that. I'm not Linux exclusively. Sometimes I use BSD in a VM, after all. Err... I think I have a Minix VM that I've booted a few times. ;-)
For stuff like what I do? Meh... It works, I've not really noticed much of an improvement in overall speeds in years. The Intel, as mentioned, in my laptop is pretty fast. It's not an amount faster that makes me go, "wow." I don't think I've had a speed increase make me 'wow' in a long time. It's kind of sad.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Yeah! That's another reason the architecture, if you can call it that, sucks balls... It's our fault, for not making an effort to keep the far superior Alpha chip alive. The fucking market always picks the inferior product to save a goddamn penny!