AMD Piledriver CPU shows its face...

dividebyzero

Posts: 4,840   +1,271
First engineering samples of AMD's Piledriver (FX-83xx, 63xx, 43xx) CPU's are about to break cover.
As per AMD's recent white paper which I linked to in an earlier post (pdf link), Piledriver = Bulldozer C0 revision (shipping Bulldozer parts being currently B2), so basically you're looking at a slight speed bump (200MHz by current accounts) and a little more efficiency over the present parts.
Piledriver.jpg

[Source]
 
Bulldozer still doesn't seem to be as popular as it should have been...

I'd love to see AMD get back in the race a little bit, because they are just not doing that well these days. I feel like if they hadn't acquired ATI when they did they may have not been around today.
 
I'd argue that Bulldozer is as popular as it deserves to be. It might have been closer to what was promised if it had been released 2-3 years ago as originally intended, but AMD management seem famous for underestimating the technical abilities of their competition whilst simultaneously banking on the best case scenario for their own products. Even after BD falling short, AMD still set Piledrivers performance targets fairly high, but if this result is to be believed, it's only showing marginal (if any) improvement over the FX-8150 (the thread also contains Cinebench 11.5 and SuperPi results), so even if the C0 revision ends up being Bulldozer Mk.II rather than Piledriver it seems somewhat short of AMD's last(?) slide deck -either the FX-8300's being benched now are Piledriver and aren't adding the performance promised -even allowing for immature BIOS's, or the FX-8300's are Bulldozer C0 revision and AMD's timetable has slipped since last month- since AMD's slides clearly promise Piledriver this year. I'd consider it unlikely that AMD would revise Bulldozer for October launch only to have Piledriver render it obsolete in December...although this is AMD so nothing should be a given.

If they hadn't bought ATI, they would likely have been snapped up for their IP for what amounts to pocket change. Without "Fusion" APU's which leverage ATI's graphics IP, AMD's cupboard looks pretty bare.

EDIT: Seems that the performance numbers of Bulldozer C0/Piledriver doing the rounds in the forums might not be too far off the mark regardless of what name it ends up saddled with if this VR-Zone article is anything to go by.
 
There seems to be a major disconnect between the engineers at AMD and the marketing team; products seem to perform much better on paper than in real-life.
 
AMD have always been more than a little dysfunctional on the management side. From Randy Allen's ill-advised Barcelona pie-in-the-sky rhetoric, to questionable guerilla marketing of Bulldozer (aka The John Fruehe Experience), with noteable guest appearances by Hector Ruin Ruiz, Richard Huddy, Nigel Dessau, and a slew of other Z-list power point ninja's.

Going forward, AMD need to cut back on the bombast and just get on with the business of putting out silicon...and to stop derailing their own engineers/architects efforts. The rehiring of Jim Keller (which is arguably AMD's biggest positive move in years), and the hiring of John Gustafson have the potential to really kickstart AMD's business....assuming they are given enough free rein to produce product without arbitrary BoD intervention. A telling statistic is that of AMD's nine board members that determine company strategy ( Rory Read and an independant director complete the eleven person board), five have been on the board since 2006 (I.e. presiding since before Barcelona).
 
OBR has early benchmarks hosted (via Coolaler). Looks as though the FX-8350 is competive with Intel's 2600K -at least at stock settings 4.0/4.2turbo vs 3.4/3.9turbo respectively, and raw performance. Leaving aside his subjective comments, the previous benchmarks for the FX-8150 were pretty much spot on (or at least closer than AMD's PR spinners), and I wouldn't see any reason to doubt these- they are in line with what is expected.

/soz for the bump
 
Undefined
OBR has early benchmarks hosted (via Coolaler). Looks as though the FX-8350 is competive with Intel's 2600K -at least at stock settings 4.0/4.2turbo vs 3.4/3.9turbo respectively, and raw performance. Leaving aside his subjective comments, the previous benchmarks for the FX-8150 were pretty much spot on (or at least closer than AMD's PR spinners), and I wouldn't see any reason to doubt these- they are in line with what is expected.

/soz for the bump
First of all OBR is a liar and shill for Intel. He never reveals his sources for information and never ran a proper series of applications to determine real-world performance for FX-8350. Secondly the review here from Steve, the Aussie, was a piece of flotsum. He never used any multithreaded real apps to test the cpu only synthetic benchmarks. on winzip , latest release I believe it is 16 or 16.5 the FX-8350 blew away all the competition , including an I7 3770. On photosho cs 5 once again FX-8350 was neck and neck with I7 3770 . Notice that OBR used version photoshop cs3 that was old and poorly threaded to skew the results against AMD. He is a charlatan who deserves NO respect.
Steve failed to use any of the quality video editing software out there. If he had FX 8350 would have been neck and neck with I7 3770 again. As far as gaming is concerned it was lot better than the review by Steve showed. He cherry picked the games used to test so they were all single threaded. There are many popular games now that are multi-threaded that Steve did not test with. He had no insight in his review on the cpu architecture as well. Compare his hack job to the review at Tom's Hardware which was far more thorough and tested many applications and games. Under the conditions that the vast majority of gamers use , the AMD fx-8350 will give smooth performance. No it will not in most games give 120 frames per second. Tell me what percentage of gamers have 120 HZ monitors???? Very few!!! Any game that can deliver 60-65 fps is more than adequate for gaming except for those who have thousands to spend on monitors and multi-gpu cards For the finicky few buy Intel, for the 99.5 % who work for a living and appreciate the value of their labor, go with AMD. Steve should retract his garbage review of the AMD FX-8350. It is NOT worthy of the quality reviews I have seen on this web site for hardware. He owes all of us apologies. for a unscientific testing procedure and use of synthetic benchmarks rather than real world applications. THAT is intellectual laziness and INEXCUSABLE!
 
First of all OBR is a liar and shill for Intel.
So is your pal Charlie Demerjian. Both have their following.
FWIW's OBR's numbers are closer to reality than AMD's own power point slideshow propaganda and guerilla marketeers like John Fruehe. All OBR's done is bring Coolaler's testing to a wider audience, albeit with a certain amount of anti-AMD vitriol attached -but it's no different to Chuckie D's anti-Nvidia bombast, so as they say, turn about is fair play
He never reveals his sources for information
Anyone with an interest in tech that goes futher than mainstream sites knows where his info comes from.
Secondly the review here from Steve, the Aussie
Don't care.
Got an issue with the review? comment in the review thread....but you've already done that...and left a message on Steve's profile. My, aren't you the psychotic one.
 
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