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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."
Intel has a lot to learn from its smaller rival's marketing department :)
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/217672-analysis-amd-lawsuit-over-false-bulldozer-chip-marketing-is-without-merit
An i5 has 4 physical cores without HT, dummy.
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.
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.
Why do you think AMD going bust would magically mean someone new stepping up to the plate? There are effing ginormous obstacles for a start-up to come and compete in the x86-scene, so much so that it's nearly impossible, and if Intel got a monopoly on the market even for a brief moment the situation would become even worse!
No, the better option is that AMD gets their shit together, never giving Intel full monopoly on the x86-market even for a bit.
At least their marketing is honest: a bulldozer is a very slow vehicle!
i5 is just branding, it doesn't describe physical features. Broadwell desktop i5 has 4 cores no threads, mobile has 2 cores as 4 threads,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadwell_(microarchitecture)#Mobile_processors
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.
Real life is not like software. The cost of developing a totally new produce is not a couple million for some really smart engineers and the computers they use.
How much does it cost to set up a chip fab? Me memory from a late 90s factoid was it was the Billion$ range, and with the ever-shrinking nanometer processes they keep coming up with it can't have gotten cheaper.
When a major player goes bankrupt in a market like that it makes it much harder for anew guy to enter, because all the banker isn't stupid. If a company with decades of experience, existing fabs, etc. goes bankrupt, then the odds against our innovative new start-up have to be pretty bad, and a loan in that range has to be extremely fucking risky.
You're right! They're a joke! Hopefully they go bankrupt so you can buy an i5 for the price of a Xeon!
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
No, the better option is that AMD gets their shit together, never giving Intel full monopoly on the x86-market even for a bit.
Myself and a friend have been AMD fanboys for 20 years. I built my first system on AMD 133mhz '486. Since then he abandoned AMD on his last workstation build and went all Intel. I have a FX-8150 and a FX-8350 in my builds right now. He has given up on AMD and I'm not far behind. I'm looking at my next workstation build sometime in 2016. I'm not ready to completely abandon AMD. I'm gong to wait and see what the specs on the AM4 bring to the table but I expect to be disappointed.
A few months back we looked to see who might be interested in buying AMD and keeping as a whole. We didn't come up with any one. What we got was a list of people that might be interested in parts of AMD. Sony or Microsoft might buy their chip facilities since they do use AMD chips as the CPU/GPU in their consoles. AMD has a few patents that both Nvidia and Intel might be interested in picking up.
Realistically AMD is to far behind the technological curve in so many areas. Even looking at the specs to the new AM4 systems I can tell they are behind Intel in almost every aspect. AMD has always been behind Intel in the performance area for most of its life. But they where never so far behind that their lower prices didn't make up for. That is not true with the FX chips. The performance gap is not worth the lower cost.
Lets hope AMD gets their shit together. As I've said before. The fat lady hasn't sung yet on AMD but she is warming up in the bullpit. Lets hope that as she waddles up on stage AMD pulls a rabbit out of the hat and she falls off the stage into a tuba.
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Wrong. Many i5 CPUs only have two physical cores that are identified as 4 cores due to threading.
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 know AMD doesn't own chip fabs, right? They were spun out into Global Foundries.
But you are right about the cost of designing a new chip. I would expect the cost to design, validate, manufacture a competitive x86 chip is going to be hundreds of millions of dollars.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
No, the better option is that AMD gets their shit together, never giving Intel full monopoly on the x86-market even for a bit.
Unfortunately its less about AMD getting their shit together, and Intel not being punished enough for their behaviour 10-20 years ago which blocked AMD. At this point unless AMD gets lucky (or skilled whatever) in a future architecture which places them ahead or on par with Intel, and Intel doesn't get a pass on monopolistic behaviour AMD is never going to be more than a niche pick.
Nope, as explained elsewhere what AMD is doing is not the same as HT.
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?
AMD has always been behind Intel in the performance area for most of its life.
Well, there was the Athlon - era where they were sweeping the floors with Intel; the classic Athlons and Athlon XPs were phenomenal CPUs at the time and highly overclockable. It was glorious, but yeah, I think that was pretty much the only time they beat Intel.
Lets hope AMD gets their shit together. As I've said before. The fat lady hasn't sung yet on AMD but she is warming up in the bullpit. Lets hope that as she waddles up on stage AMD pulls a rabbit out of the hat and she falls off the stage into a tuba.
I really, *REALLY* hope they can manage to do it, but.. I just haven't heard any promising news in that regards anywhere. There's quite literally nothing to indicate that AMD has in any way or form stopped digging even further down the hole they are already in. I do dread the day when Intel becomes the sole x86 - vendor and can practically demand whatever they want, do whatever they want and laugh all the way to the bank.
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.
I facepalmed at the mention of how Intel allegedly doesn't do this... does anybody remember HyperThreading? :-P
Intel's marketing for hyperthreading shows a quad, or hexa core processor that supports hyperthreading. So they advertise a four or six core processor that shows up as 8 or 12 cores in Windows.
AMD advertises an eight core bulldozer processor, but you only have four FPUs on the chip.
So Intel says you can run two threads on a single core, AMD says you have twice the number of FPUs so they aren't full cores.
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."
Well, there was the Athlon - era where they were sweeping the floors with Intel
Those where glorious days, where they not? I remember the race to 1 ghz and AMD beat Intel to that mark. AMD didn't just inch ahead there ether, they rode Intel hard and put them away wet. Those where good days.
Then Intel caught up and stayed ahead most of the time but AMD was still able to maintain a competitive edge in price. The performance for a Intel chip vs AMD was about 5% to 10% in most areas but AMD's prices where a hundred or more dollars cheaper than Intel. For that much of a difference a 5% gap in performance didn't matter.
We still see that much of a price difference but the performance gap is like 40% or greater. That is not worth the discount of a AMD part. There there are other technological gaps like DDR4, USB3, and PCI 3.0 support.
I looked at what AM4 was bringing to the table next year in 2016. Problem is, everything its bringing Intel had out last year. I think things are looking pretty bleak for AMD in 2016.
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Sony or Microsoft might buy their chip facilities since they do use AMD chips as the CPU/GPU in their consoles
Given that AMD spun off its chip facilities a few years ago, I think we can probably ignore your market analysis.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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
My rig just built is as fast as any Intel system even for gaming. I have an AMD FX 4350, MSI high end motherboard, 16GB of memory, all of which cost me less than 250.00 and it's all off the shelf (for AMD the most expensive gear you can buy but nothing custom ordered). I would have a hard time getting a Motherboard and memory for an Intel at the same price. Then I would have to dump out a few hundred more for a 4core 4.2GHz chip.
I dual boot Linux and Windows, and there is nothing Intel could do faster or better than my rig for any workload I can do at home.
Now for less than 250.00 what would you be able to do with Intel? What could you measure an increase over AMD with? Nothing.
You are not an AMD fanbo, you are a shill trying to disguise yourself as one.
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.
The point is that they still are not real cores.
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.
try msinfo32, try the performance tab in Task Manager
the shit you linked states exactly what the guy said. 2 physical and 2 logical cores. at least learn how to read your own links.
Leading to Intel releasing the flawed Coppermine Pentium 3 1.13 GHz which had to be recalled.
i3, i5, and i7 represent "good", "better", and "best" respectively. That's it. A *particular* SKU with an i5 mark may have 4 physical cores, but 4 physical cores is not a requirement to receive the mark.
For example, this i5 has 4 physical cores: http://ark.intel.com/products/... while this i5 has 2 physical cores http://ark.intel.com/products/...
That's fine, as most serious computing is not done with FPU at all.
Sure it can fly itself
I can put my car on cruise control and it will drive itself, eventually into a wall or ditch or another car
msinfo32 says "2 Core(s), 4 Logical Processor(s)" on this i5-3470T
Performance tab in Task Manager says:
Cores: 2
Logical processors: 4
Intel market it as a dual core CPU as well.
That's all well and good, but you can't call it multicore. You are correct in that it will be pretty hard to prove damages.
You can replace "physical cores" with "cores", Intel has never confused hyperthreading with CPU cores.
How much does it cost to set up a chip fab? Me memory from a late 90s factoid was it was the Billion$ range, and with the ever-shrinking nanometer processes they keep coming up with it can't have gotten cheaper. When a major player goes bankrupt in a market like that it makes it much harder for anew guy to enter, because all the banker isn't stupid. If a company with decades of experience, existing fabs, etc. goes bankrupt, then the odds against our innovative new start-up have to be pretty bad, and a loan in that range has to be extremely fucking risky.
Except that AMD isn't in the chip manufacturing business anymore, that's TSMC, GloFo and Samsung and they split investment costs across the whole ARM market too. In fact, their 14/16nm process is more competitive with Intel than ever, it's AMD that needs to come up with some kick-ass designs. Of course laying out >1 billion transistors in an optimal way is roughly as hard as it sounds....
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It's fine? Compared to a dual core Haswel with 16 integer units. They don't say it's a 16 core CPU
In this thread, it's not Intel's confusion that I am worried about ;-)
Your rig is slower for gaming than a top end i3 which would cost the same to buy and use less power. Its single thread or dual thread performance, which is most important for games, is 25% slower than that dual core i3 with hyperthreading and its 4 thread performance is only 1-2% better than a dual core i3. In 90% of real world workloads your amd is slower and by a big margin at 25%.
In addition to that your amd has to run faster, hotter and use more power to get slower performance and doesnt even have a gpu on board. It doesnt support pcie 3 so top end graphics card performance is slower and its memmory latency is double that of the i3 and the memmory bandwidth is 30% less.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, you get the Intel machine for high performance applications and AMD for running lots of VMs. FPU is not needed for basically anything but computational stuff. If you want to run a few systems and compile in a few different environments (linux/windows/32 bits/64 bits... that's already a combo of 4), you get AMD and lots of memory.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
My first was the K6-2 350 MHz that I OCed to just under 500 MHz. It would go a step higher but was not stable. It was awesome. I still, happily, buy AMD. I find that the CPU is fast enough for everything I do. They became fast enough about five years ago. I don't really need any more speed. Buying new PCs is just a luxury that I enjoy - I don't actually need any of them.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
It's false advertising, the two cores in a module share an instruction pipeline.
That leads to the possibility of one core being starved of instructions because the other one suffered a cache miss.
Itanium isn't x86. Try again.
Intel does so it.
They just call it a single core with hyperthreading.
Since Haswell, there are 8 execution ports in each core that can dish micro-ops to one of 20 execution units - which is made up of memory ops, ALU's and FPU's. They even added an extra branch unit, so hyperthreading can continue one thread while the other does complex FPU ops that take up multiple cycles.
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.
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Ah yes, yepping of the disbeliever. We'll I guess I'm not. I guess the fact that my workstation is a fx-8150 and my linux box is a fx-8350. I have a A-5350 in my htpc and my old workstation is a Phenom II 965. The rig I build for my daughter is only a AMD 6300. I won't talk about the 9950, 9850, 1440XP, and the T'bird 950 before that. Yup your correct, I've never been a AMD fanboy.
Look, your little toy box is nice but if you want to run with the big dogs you best know what you're talking about. I'm glad it works for you but some of us don't live in denial. When I upgrade I plan to go Intel. I will give AMD a chance with its new platform but I'm expecting disappointment.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
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.
I do dread the day when Intel becomes the sole x86 - vendor and can practically demand whatever they want, do whatever they want and laugh all the way to the bank.
The likelihood of that happening now is actually fairly small. ARM chips these days are getting pretty decent, with some ARM servers even being looked at for datacenters. If Intel jacks up the prices System vendors will just move to ARM.
Add in that there is already a - rather crippled right now, but easily open-able - version of Windows that runs on ARM, as well as many Linux distros and O/S.X builds that run on ARM.... it would be pretty much a death sentence for Intel and X86. There might be some pain at first for hardware integrators, but with what is already out there right now, it wouldn't be impossible to phase out ( majorly expensive ) Intel X86_64 systems for ARM systems in a short amount of time.
If Intel jacks up the prices System vendors will just move to ARM. Then Intel would be relegated to the high end server market, until ARM or another architecture ( IBM ramps up POWER CPU, someone releases cheap OpenSPARC chips ETC ) and either forces them down in price or just outcompetes them from the market.
What would be truly interesting would be if you could get an ARM system that can use all of your existing external peripherals I.E. PCI / PCIE addon cards. You could run a few "high end" cores for stuff that is good for single threading, and have tons of lower / slower cores you can dynamically power up for stuff that benefits from massive parallelization, all in approximately the same thermal envelope as X86.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
i3, i5, and i7 represent "good", "better", and "best" respectively. That's it.
Worse still they only represent that within a given generation and within a particular "market segment".
My theory is they designed this naming scheme to deliberately mislead customers into thinking ultraportables could be as powerful as desktops while the reality is an ultra-mobile i7 is less powerful than a desktop i3.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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.
You are not too smart. 4 HARDWARE THREADS in an I5. Get it?
Not all i5's have 4 physical cores. Neither do all i7's (5500u for example).
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Run an integer-benchmark on them some time. These are 8 full cores performance-wise. HT cannot do that. It gives you something like 40% in addition. If you are lucky.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Addendum: You are stupid. Because if AMD goes away. Intel will become much, much worse than you perceive (wrongly) AMD to be.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
Sony or Microsoft might buy their chip facilities since they do use AMD chips as the CPU/GPU in their consoles
Given that AMD spun off its chip facilities a few years ago, I think we can probably ignore your market analysis.
Personally I think AMD should give up and sell their assets under bankruptacy to Samsung or Realtek or some ARM cpu manufacturer who is component and knows what they are doing and can write decent drivers. :-(
AMD is damaged goods man and you know why they suck? No one including global foundaries wants to invest making chips that are not 2012 era technology! Global foundaries said there is no demand for AMD chips and their new cutting edge .18 NM plants only make chips for cell phones for Apple, LG, etc. Once they go out of date and are slow and big like .28 microns they use them for AMD chips. ... meanwhile Intel's skylake is .14 NM and moving forward. How can you compete with that? They are toast. I would still buy ATI graphics cards if people would not keep dropping them like Falcon Northwest (I think that was the one) whose customer service reps demanded they only support NVidia as 80% of callers had ATI problems with the drivers.
If another company had some skin in the game they could use their chip designers to update their x86 line and give more up to date plants. Competing with Intel is like competing against Walmart these days. It can't be done.
http://saveie6.com/
If Intel jacks up the prices System vendors will just move to ARM.
That's hogwash. Almost *none* of all the available Windows-software is available for ARM, including games -- no chance in hell of people moving to ARM and letting go of all of their software, especially so for gamers and people with specialized software. Basically the only people capable of moving between x86 and ARM are those who only use F/OSS-software.
Mod parent up. It is correct. Some i5's do have 2 cores. The original AC post near the top is also correct, which I notice the mods have knocked to -1 in the usual frenzy of "I disagree, although I am uninformed about the matter."
For a couple decades, "core" meant CPU. 4004, 1802, 8080, 6800, 6809, Z80, 68000... etc.
Then it meant CPU+MMU.
What's funny is that "core" now seems to mean CPU+MMU+FPU (which is great... I love me an FPU per core.) But some (often aimed at mobile or tablets or phones) also have GPUs.
So how long before we won't accept "core" except as a label for CPU+MMU+FPU+GPU?
Then it might be "Nah, that thing has no NPU (neural processing unit), that's not a "real core": CPU+MMU+FPU+GPU+NPU
Then perhaps it'll be "Nah, that thing has no QPU (quantum processing unit)", that's not a "real core": CPU+MMU+ FPU+GPU+NPU+QPU
Then... well, I have no idea. But I do think it'll be something. It's always something. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
No one said ARM would instantly replace X86 hardware, there would be no reason for it.
But software will follow hardware, if Intel _would_ suddenly, or even over a period of time, increase prices to an extreme amount both companies and consumers would opt for the much cheaper alternatives that would crop up. Especially companies, once the price points of hardware outweighed the cost of porting to a new architecture... it's porting time. And once companies start switching it will trickle down to consumers faster and faster, much like how windows is used the most common in business and so is also most used commonly in the home since it is what the PC purchasers were familiar with.
Basically you have the time T1, the span of time where prices start to increase to the breaking point and the time T2, the span of time from the price breaking point, where life of the hardware in use should last. T1 + T2 would be years, possibly up to a decade or longer depending on hardware stockpiles.
That is more than enough time for things to be ported. Even if it was a short lead up time, I am very sure Microsoft and Apple, much less Linux, would have very little trouble coming up with something like Rosetta, the program that let Power architecture Mac software run on Intel Macs on their own OS.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
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.
Well, your portable i7 probably has features like VT-d and turboboost whereas the desktop i3 probably doesn't. But in any case, Intel's product line is a total mess.
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.
If you need x86 in a embedded application you should look at a atom processor.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
You're an idiot, to put it bluntly. AMD is Intel's only semi - credible competition and if they go tits up you can look forward to paying $500 for a middle to low grade processor again like the 80s and 90s. It wasn't until AMD's K5 came along and was "good enough" for most business tasks that Intel started pricing competitively and it wasn't until the K6 (briefly) took the performance crown that Intel actually got scared. If AMD goes under, there is NOBODY who can step into the void they will create at current. Starting up a chip company isn't like opening a 7-11, it's an unbelievably expensive and complex undertaking, and most investors would be extremely gunshy to back a new company that intends to compete with Intel.
That means you can absolutely expect to pay double or even triple what you're currently paying for a processor and an nVidia card since if AMD is gone, so are the Radeon cards. The only place there would still be competition is in the tablet/phone space where a bunch of ARM manufacturers are established. And no, I doubt any of them would see the demise of AMD as an invitation to dance with Intel on the desktop.
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.
AMD advertises an eight core bulldozer processor, but you only have four FPUs on the chip.
That's not really true though. You have one full 128 bit FMAC unit per core, which can be temporarily be loaned to the other core in the same module. If you don't use AVX instructions then each core can independently perform 2xdouble operations.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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!
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
But even if a CPU has an integrated GPU, it's not part of any specific core. It's just off on its own. Not to mention, for the foreseeable future, high end desktop/server CPUs won't have integrated GPUs.
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.
You obviously have never heard of what a "monopoly" is and that it is universally bad for the market. Stupid.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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."
I'm sorry that you feel that way but I've been doing this for a very long time. I've had numerous AMD chips over the years and I can say only for that short span of period AMD chips have always trailed behind Intel in performance. That performance gap was only around 5% to 10% on average.
The last figures I ran put my old phenom II 965 at 3.4 ghz against a 3.2 Ghz I5 with 4 cores. The result was exactly what I expected. The AMD 965 inched out the i5 by a very small margin, about 3%, due to higher clock rate. I estimated at the time if I slowed the 965 down to 3.2Ghz it would fit nicely with in the standard model 5% to 10% gap.
We tested my FX-8150 at 3.6 ghz against a 3.6 ghz i7. I don't remember the model number of the i7. The performance gap stunned us. A 20% fo 40% gap on performance in the i7 favor.
AMD has made great chips before, and thier chips are still good. But you just can't compare them to what intel offers now in terms of performance.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification