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Cue the “fine wine” bulldozer memes. Are the memes grounded on reality though? Plenty of youtube videos from 2020 or later showing the 8350 displaying some impr

• BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Seems like where AMD went wrong is expecteing programmers to be able to easily take advantage of multithreading... while in reality the extra performance is often not worth the extra complexity, and sometimes it's even impossible to implement ?
  • zokier 4y ago
    Well, one big aspect is gaming, and in particular consoles at that time only had few cores. That changed few years later with ps4/xb1, but of course it took bit longer for gamedevs to catch up. It didn't help that it was also time when Intel was at top of their game, still pushing significant single-thread perf improvements. Sandy Bridge, which was Bulldozers main competitor, was exceptionally successful launch on its own right
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • adrian_b 4y ago
    No, where AMD went wrong was in marketing. For some years, and especially during the last six months before the Bulldozer launch in 2011, AMD has continuously made various claims about its performance, always stressing that it will crush Sandy Bridge, due to having a double number of "cores". Immediately after launch, all the AMD claims were proved to be shameless lies. There is absolutely no excuse for AMD. Intel had published accurate information about the performance of Sandy Bridge, one year in advance. Even without the advance publication, the performance of Sandy Bridge could have been easily extrapolated from the evolution of Penryn, Nehalem and Westmere. The performance of Bulldozer was determined by design decisions taken by AMD at least 3 to 4 years before its launch. Therefore, during the last 6 months, when they have lied the most, they knew perfectly well that they were lying and it should have been obvious to them that this is futile, because the lies will be exposed by independent benchmarks immediately after launch. For most operations, a so-called Bulldozer "module" (with 2 "cores") had exactly the same execution resources as a Sandy Bridge core, while for a few operations, like integer multiplication, a Bulldozer "module" had even less execution resources than a Sandy Bridge core. The common FPU of 2 Bulldozer "cores" was more or less equivalent with the FPU of a single Sandy Bridge core. The Bulldozer integer "cores" were stripped down in comparison with the cores of the previous AMD CPUs, e.g. a new "core" had 2/3 of the addition throughput and 1/2 of the multiplication throughput of an old core. So 2 Bulldozer integer "cores" were together barely faster than one old AMD core, while a single Sandy Bridge core was faster than them, by having an equal addition throughput, but a double multiplication throughput. Bulldozer could have been a decent CPU, if only AMD, instead of describing it as a 4-"module"/8-"core" CPU, would have described it as a 4-core/8-thread CPU, which matched Sandy Bridge, except that in Sandy Bridge the 2 threads of a core shared dynamically most execution resources, while in Bulldozer only a part of the execution resources were shared dynamically, e.g. the FPU, while the rest of the execution resources were allocated statically to the 2 threads of a core, which is less efficient. Such a description would have set correctly the expectations of the users, and they would not have felt cheated. I am pretty certain that the huge disappointment that has accompanied the Bulldozer launch has hurt much more the AMD sales than they might have gained from the buyers lured by the false advertising about the 8-core monster AMD CPUs, which should easily beat the puny 4-core Intel CPUs.
    • Paianni 4y ago
      Gaming and enthusiast machines are only a fraction of AMD's market, most consumers and clients didn't care about the features AMD's marketing department lied about.
      • yvdriess 4y ago
        Most gaming consumers got an AMD whether they wanted it or not, as the Jaguar cores were in both PS4 and Xbox One.
        • selectodude 4y ago
          But they specifically weren't that jacked up "clustered multi-thread" that Bulldozer had.
        • Narishma 4y ago
          Jaguar is unrelated to Bulldozer.
      • adrian_b 4y ago
        AMD did not lie about some particular feature of Bulldozer. They lied by claiming that Bulldozer should be faster than Sandy Bridge, while knowing that it is completely impossible for their claims to be true. Even without running any benchmark, it was trivial to predict that at similar clock frequencies the "8-core" Bulldozer must be slower than the 4-core Sandy Bridge. For multi-threaded performance, the complete Bulldozer had between 50% and 100% of the number of arithmetic units of Sandy Bridge, so in the best case it could match but not exceed Sandy Bridge. For single-threaded integer performance, one Bulldozer "core" had between 25% and 50% of the number of arithmetic units of Sandy Bridge, so in the best case it could be only half as fast as Sandy Bridge. The only chance for Bulldozer to beat Sandy Bridge as in the AMD claims would have been a very high clock frequency, in the 5 to 7 GHz range. However, AMD never made the false claim that Bulldozer will beat Sandy Bridge by having a much higher clock frequency. They claimed that they will beat Intel by having more "cores", which implied more arithmetic units, while knowing very well that they had decided to remove a large part of the arithmetic units from their cores, at the same time when Intel was adding arithmetic units to their cores, instead of removing them.
• tormeh 4y ago
  Well, multithreading got more important with time, so it makes sense to me.
• Maakuth 4y ago
  8350 is Piledriver, the design evolved from Bulldozer. It addressed many of the Bulldozer shortcomings.