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If he was right with FP, he'd know better than the business analysts at Intel. Instead, his opinion is based on what the market looked like thirty years ago. N
by gridlockd 6y ago
If he was right with FP, he'd know better than the business analysts at Intel. Instead, his opinion is based on what the market looked like thirty years ago.
Nine years ago, AMD tested the hypothesis that really more "cores" and higher integer throughput were all that was needed and that FP performance didn't matter. The resulting architecture (Bulldozer) was a near-fatal disaster. It didn't even work out in the datacenter, where you might expect that hypothesis to hold.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoAMD is currently giving intel great pain. So much for business analysts at Intel.
- theevilsharpie 6y agoAMD is doing well in the CPU market today _because_ they reversed course from the Bulldozer-based architectures.
- AnthonyMouse 6y agoMore than that, Bulldozer didn't even have good single thread integer performance. What it gave you was 8 cores that might be able to keep up with 4 of Intel's cores on something that has 8 threads. The market was not particularly interested in this, especially since at the time even fewer things could actually use 8 threads than they do now.
- gridlockd 6y agoBulldozer significantly outperformed Sandy Bridge on the workloads which it was designed to be good at, which is multi-threaded integer workloads, like compiling the Linux kernel. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_fx8150_bulldozer&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_fx81... https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_fx8350_visherabdver2&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_fx83... If Linus' attitude of "I'd rather have more cores" and "FP doesn't really matter" were representative of market demand, you'd have expected Bulldozer to do well at least somewhere, as opposed to nowhere.
- AnthonyMouse 6y agoAre we looking at the same benchmarks? In the first they're comparing an 8-core Bulldozer to Sandy Bridge with 4 cores and no hyperthreading and it's basically even, sometimes it wins by a small margin on the threaded ones. In the second the 3770K has 4 cores with hyperthreading and that makes it look even worse. If they were actually getting twice the integer performance per module as Intel was getting per core then it might've been interesting, but being the same or only slightly better when comparing modules to cores wasn't enough to overcome the single thread performance deficit which people still care about a lot.
- gridlockd 6y agoYou have to look for them, but there are benchmarks where AMD outperforms significantly. I cant find the Linux compilation benchmark now, but the difference was not small. The Bulldozer really did have a big advantage in integer throughput per dollar, but that does not translate to a 2x speedup in pretty much any benchmark. FP throughput on the other hand shows up a lot.
- gnufx 6y agoI think we'd have been rather better off buying a load of Magny Cours rather than Sandybridge for a university HPC system whose procurement I wasn't sufficiently involved in.
- TinkersW 6y agoIf Intel had their shit together they would have released AVX512 years ago with Skylake desktop, but they prefer to artificially segment the market, and have still not managed to release a desktop chip with AVX512--allowing AMD to catch up and now in many ways surpass them.
- pjmlp 6y agoThe only pain I see is they having won the CPU for game consoles. All our laptops have Intel stickers on them and I doubt AMD is winning crazy dollars on cloud deployments.