SeiveD said:
Everyone seems to be ranting about how AMD is just "throwing more cores at you to compete with intel". I've seen other forums where people foolishly make the comparison between "INTEL WITH 4 CORES AND 8 THREADS LAHL" vs "AMD WITH 8 WHOLE CORES".. That's not exactly the case, as none of you have clearly been paying attention. Basically, AMD's Bulldozer has modules which are essentially two cores which share a single 128-bit FPU. This is what AMD is calling "hyperthreading done right"(or maybe I'm calling it that, nonetheless that's what it is). Given two threads into a single module, it should outperform a single Intel core running two threads as well. If you take a 4-core Intel CPU with hyperthreading, and an '8-core'(4 module) bulldozer, they will both show up as having 8 CPUs in your operating system. The difference AMD is willing to call them all cores. but they've put more hardware behind it, sure, but I read that doing what they've done, they've essentially doubled the cores (yet sharing a single FPU between each two) while only increasing the used die space by some 12% .
Really, a 4-core Intel processor should compare with an '8-core'/4-module bulldozer. They are on the same level. AMD did it differently, they number cores differently, but it's their own approach to the same problem. If it outperforms the Intel in that class, then I'd say they've done a damn good job at it.
Besides, all I've seen is one supposedly leaked benchmark, can't we wait til the thing is released for testing to see what it can really do rather than just sit here and talk trash about it before hand?