Friday, September 16, 2011

Repost : Crazy blogger with an ego problem

 Due to popularity of this one single post I will re-post it again ^^.  Since I was notified via PM on XS forum about the lies and crap he is writing about me and others,I will be re-posting the truth about this guy. "The blogger with mental disorder" will be exposed again,and again if needed  Enjoy :).

Many of you have already heard about the notorious blogger from Czech republic. A guy that goes by the username "OBR". Well in his latest posts he went completely overboard with insults and bad mouthing,insulting groups of internet forum users,accusing many folks of lying(mostly AMD's people),some guys that he even personally knows, AMD's PR department,AMD's John Fruehe - the guy that stands behind the server division and posts occasionally on the tech forums, etc.

Now some forum posters found this very amusing ,especially knowing that OBR himself admitted he lied and purposely faked Zambezi results  and fed the fake results to many IT websites.They all took the results seriously and posted them citing "genuine sources". Then the FUD train started to roll and we have what we can call today a mess. This guy is a pure hypocrite.
A picture is worth a thousand words:

Thursday, September 15, 2011

SB-E 3690X benchmarked by THG,Bulldozer controversy continues

Looks like THG got a pre-production SB-E system and run some tests on it. Nothing spectacular compered to 990x/980x,around 10% faster . Still pretty good improvement for a same core count part.

On the other hand ,controversy regarding Zambezi (desktop Bulldozer part) continues. We have some new data that points at in between 2500K and 2600K multithread performance and abysmal single thread performance. Nothing is final yet,but don't expect some sort of SB killer from Zambezi. Even in its strongest performance department which is multithread performance,it looks it will even fail to beat X6 Thuban by a decent margin. Performance is indeed just a little better,if better at all. Price is still hard to figure out. AMD plans to charge 250$ ,approximately, for the FX8150. Unless they are just counting on more OC headroom,nothing else warrants this higher price than existing X6 1100T. This is indeed kind of a let down. It turns out that 4 module part is closer to 4 core part with SMT in performance than to a 8 or even 6 core part. Performance,especially in floating point applications is all over the place,ranging to much slower (linpack) to even("8C" FX @ 3.6Ghz vs 1100T in C11.5) to slightly faster (wprime) . This uncertainty when it comes to performance kind of defeats the whole module concept because AMD touted it as much more consistent performance uplift versus intel's SMT approach. As it turns out,it is not so different after all... Good thing about Zambezi is that it will at least clock high. Some reports point to 4.8Ghz as "normal" overclock across 4 modules,on air.

update: I've just read on XS(thanks chew*) that Zambezi will have even higher OC potential than 4.8Ghz. On air(stock cooling),supposedly one can expect 5+Ghz - regular daily use and benchmarking . By chew*:
I think that any info other than what I or AMD have personally offered which is not much if any can be discarded until further notice.

There are still peices to the puzzle missing that I can assure you 99.9% don't have yet regarding CPU rev and bios support and agesa.

To sum up BD facts

BD is physically a 4 core 8 thread part.

It has no coldbug

Samples can bench at 5+ on stock cooler, 6+ on phase change and 8.4 on lhe.

And most important of all SATA works

Like i said before the joke is on that guy we won't name, he was sent intentionally quite possilby the worst chip ever produced. 6.4 on ln2,
or he needs to learn how to OC, 6.4 is my validation speed on phase change......he who laughs last laughs best............. 
So with phase change 6+Ghz and with LN2 7+ Ghz and maybe 8Ghz. For water cooling ,I suppose 5.5Ghz is not out of the realm of possibility. So with this latest information in mind ( which is very reliable), Zambezi may be pretty competitive with OCed SB 2600K. Since 2600K reaches around 4.5Ghz-4.8Ghz on good air cooling,Zambezi will have some frequency potential under similar conditions. This may equate to better performance in MT applications for those who actually use their overclocked machines for something useful .




Sunday, September 11, 2011

Opterons and Sisoft benchmarks-what does it all mean?

Ok a small update on sisoft numbers for Opterons.Here is 6282SE and here is 6220 . I'm pretty sure now about following things:

1)Both Opteron sisoft results are real. Some features are turned off though.

2) 6220 part has a correct SIMD throughput,while 6282SE has somewhat inflated number (memory configuration is maybe specced higher there).

3) Both 6282SE and 6220 servers had Turbo off in integer tests. First ran at 2.5Ghz(2x 16C) ,second at 3Ghz(2x8C). Multimedia test uses AVX and gives 11% better score than legacy SSE.

4) The Opterons that will launch very soon will have roughly(2P top bin next gen vs 2P top bin previous gen) : 28-30% higher spec_int_rate score and 33-35% higher spec_fp_rate score. This is 2.3Ghz(2.8Ghz Turbo on all cores for integer workloads) Interlagos Vs 2.5Ghz 12C Magny Cours. In IPC numbers this is ~7-8% higher integer IPC and 8-10% higher floating point/SIMD IPC -all in non recompiled workloads. AVX 256/128brings ~10% more in floating point and FMA brings up to 2x more over AVX,but this is "what if case" and not the norm(we have to wait for applications to be written with FMA in mind). I guess XOP will bring similar speedups to AVX ,10% or maybe more,in integer recompiled workloads.

5) Zambezi's Sisoft results that were leaked are not correct. I don't know whether the Turbo was on or off in that test,but even if it was off the results are ~17-20% lower in integer part than what the opterons show. FP part is more or less correct since Opterons score the same per core and clock, but the test was run on ES platform with 1333Mhz DDR3 memory and unknown BIOS settings. Even if we take the legacy SSE score of 132Mpix/s,which was scored at fix clock of 2.8Ghz (100% sure about this) and correct it for launch clock of FX8150 part we arrive at 170Mpix/s.This is 54% more than 1100T.If we take best for Zambezi then it will be AVX. Now it is 71% faster than 1100T (stock versus stock => 189Mpix/s Vs 110Mpix/s).
Integer throughput is around 35% higher on FX8150 versus 1100T (stock+Turbo Versus stock=>88Gops Vs 65Gops).

I suppose numbers can be higher for desktop version,by about 5% ,compared to the ones I posted in point 5). As for Opterons,I'm 99% sure this will be the speed up that SPEC benchmarks will show. Oh and STREAM(memory BW) will be around 50% faster on Interlagos ,but this is already known.

PS And yes,this means Zambezi shouldn't score lower than Thuban 1100T in Cinebench... At least not according to above. But who knows,anything is possible. Leaks so far point that top Zambezi should get score of around 6pts in C11.5 64bit test. According to sisoft numbers it should get >9pts or close to 9pts.

Friday, September 9, 2011

Bulldozer in October;new leaks point to grim performance picture

Last week or so has been full of Bulldozer news. It started shipping(finally!) in server segment and we have a confirmation that desktop launch is in Q4,presumably mid October.

We have a few more leaks,none of which point in good direction(performance wise). Whether or not the leaks are genuine and the platform is final, to me it looks like Bulldozer will have a tough time against even previous X6 cores in desktop space. Not only the integer performance is abysmal ,fp/SIMD looks to be equally bad. There still is some hope that things can get better with B2G or whatever the launch stepping will be,but I'm now pessimistic when it comes to Zambezi and its desktop performance. Zambezi X8 @ 2.8Ghz base and 4Ghz Turbo cannot beat X6 1100T @ default (with its own Turbo). This is what some leaks are showing and some guys in the know kinda confirm. The level of performance of FX8150 will then be slightly below 2500K (without SMT,just plain QC Sandy bridge with 4 threads). In single thread workloads even Thuban @ 3.7Ghz(turbo) may end up being faster . I don't know if this is a design decision or some problem in the design,but performance picture does look grim. 6-7 years of development and a lot of R&D money invested and we get something like this?