What comes after FX? FX Next

After not so successful launch of their new flagship desktop processor,AMD started talking up their next chip that will succeed Bulldozer Ver1. Say hello to FX Next ,based on Piledriver core :

Piledriver is supposed to fix certain shortcomings in BDver1 processors. I summed up some of them in my previous blog so I won't reiterate those.
What will AMD have to offer before Piledriver arrives? The following roadmap gives us some clues:

FX8170 is supposedly launching in Q1 2012. It will be based on new (somewhat improved) B3 stepping. Hopefully B3 will be enough to polish speed path issues (if there are any) and bring up clock speed. The rumored 8170 is supposed to run at 3.9/4.2/4.5Ghz clocks. This is a very solid uplift(~7.7% over 8150). Bad news is that there is no "8190" on the current roadmaps and 8170 is supposed to tide AMD over until PD arrives in Q3. That is 2 quarters... Good news is that PD will be overall 10-15% faster than what AMD has at the moment of its introduction (so 8170). This lines up well with rumored ~5% IPC increase over BD with the rest being clock speed.
So:
Q1-Q2 2012: 3.9/4.2/4.5Ghz FX8170
Q3-onward : 4.2?/4.5?/4.8?Ghz FX8280?
Effectively 4.2/3.9=1.07 or 7% clock uplift with PD. Now count in the IPC uplift of 5% or so : 1.07x1.05=1.12 or 12% overall faster than 8170. AMD said 10-15% more x86 performance with PD so this slides right in the middle of this projected figure. How much is this faster than current 8150? 8170 should be around 7% faster than 8150 so 4.2Ghz(base) PD based FX is going to be roughly 20% or so faster than 8150. Not a bad upgrade if you look at it from time perspective : 8 months after BDver1 we will get 20% faster FX part (stock vs stock). It's not unreasonable to expect better OC and thermal characteristics too,so all in all it will be a good "fix" for current BD desktop competitive situation.

PS All info above is my interpretation of available data. I used "best case scenario" above. Real PD core and 8170 may turn out to be totally different than what I speculated. We have seen this happen with BD core. Since back then I also based my predictions on publicly available data coming from AMD(which turned out to be a bit optimistic on their side) , this may happen again with PD and 8170. So take it as it is,just speculation.

Zambezi : 2nd look.

OK, I have read a lot of reviews now. Some things are clearer now.
I suppose I overreacted a bit in my previous blog. Zambezi is hot ,but overall it's not a slow chip. It performs rather well in MT applications. It does have some weaknesses which AMD must correct. Some of the weaknesses are not solely AMD's fault,but GloFo's too.

So this is what ,in my humble opinion , AMD must focus on in the future ( think Piledriver and Steamroller):
1) First and foremost AMD must invest heavily in relationship with developers. They must hire a brand new team of both young and motivated guys who will literary go out and help developers in order to maximize the potential of Bulldozer design. This first iteration is just that ,first. It has some flaws which AMD will try to fix and hopefully succeed in that task. But underlying design ,which is truly revolutionary , will need GOOD software support in order to give best performance to the end users. This means FMA4,XOP,BMI and the rest will need to be properly supported in future multimedia desktop workloads. Notice I'm speaking about DESKTOP space here. Server is in no such need since recompiling is a norm there.

2) AMD must improve the cache performance,especially L1 and L2 writes. This is a major bottleneck and it shows its ugly face in many workloads. AMD is aware of this and hopefuly Piledriver has at least somewhat better write performance with these two levels of cache. L3 looks fine,even more than that. It is much faster than L3 on Thuban.
They also need to work on improving the FP unit. It may be great in FMA4 stuff but it's much less impressive in legacy SSE or AVX128 workloads. Maybe expanding it a bit and expanding the buffers could help. Single thread performance is not anywhere near what this thing SHOULD be capable of so there must be a bottleneck somewhere since in numerous SIMD workloads it's not faster than K10's single core(and its 128b unit).

3) AMD must twist GloFo's arm very hard and very fast. Not only their 32nm production is bringing many defective Llano parts (which is truly a shame since most of the time GPU is broken and then it's not APU any more), but now they can't brake 3.6Ghz barrier on a design that was SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED FOR CLOCK speed (while it does have some IPC improvements in certain areas too). So original goal set by AMD was 30% clock uplift with the same power draw as previous design. We get this ONLY in limited Turbo mode now. We should have 4.1Ghz 125W stock clocked Zambezi parts with 4.7Ghz half core turbo and 4.5Ghz full core turbo. This Zambezi would effectively be 12% faster than 8150 with same power draw. This Zamebezi would allow AMD to use SMT core affinity scheme and release a patch for windows 7 that would force threads first to modules and not cores. Performance uplift is ranging from 5% to massive 40% in some cases,averaging to around 15-20%,depending on benchmark selection. 

So what we need is 95W 3.6Ghz FX8150, 125W 4Ghz 8170 and 4-4.2 Ghz 125W 8270 (Piledriver).
This lineup would hold off  SB and IB ,at least in mid and mid-high performance segments,without many problems.

4) AMD should work closely with MS and release a patch to windows scheduler. As in link I've provided above, performance uplift is not a small number but a very nice 15-20%.
 Trade-off is power draw though. All is explained well in this great review by harware.fr .

So there you have it. Bulldozer is not what we expected,but it's not a complete failure either. It's a solid chip which will shine in future applications ,which are going for multiple threads. Single core speed ,while still important,is not the main selling point any more. For those who want a good single core performance while having great MT performance (but still slower MT performance than FX8150) ,they can pick 2500K . It's the best chip by intel currently from perf./$ POV. 8150 is not as good but very close! It needs 10% shave from it's MSRP and AMD may sell a sh*t load of these things :).

Zambezi launched. 2 words : hot and slow .

How else to describe AMD's latest "high-end" desktop CPU? Well 2 words are enough : hot and slow. Nuff said. You can find reviews via google,best one is definitely lost circuits one:

http://www.lostcircuits.com/mambo//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=102&Itemid=42

I'm going to quote the LS author MS since he summed it up great:

Final Thoughts
Bulldozer has been in the works for so long that I don’t even remember when was the first time I heard about it. The concept, at first somewhat odd, gradually started making sense but sometimes these things happen by assimilation. Or, too many geeks who are “in the know” really knew that this was not only a great but a grand design. And who was I to doubt them?
Still, all things considered, there was still more than a shadow of a doubt. Especially when Intel re-introduced HyperThreading and got enormous mileage out of it – for the cost of essentially nothing in terms of real estate which directly translates into cost per die. But we were told over and again that none of this would make sense in light of the analyses performed by AMD’s engineering team. And now we are supposed to believe that Zambezi was designed as a direct competition to the Core i5. That was not a question but a statement.
Of course, this begs the old question, how predictable is performance on a new design? Apparently, it is hit and miss and in so far, my argument still stands, even if it is against the personal religion of some of the decision makers at AMD. This is at the end of a frustrating week, trying to find that one application that would justify buying an FX processor.

 Good luck AMD,you are going to need it :( .

Now a bit of fun :) (found it on amdzone) :
http://www.f150online.com/forums/off-roading/395038-stuck-work-pic.html

so this loader gets stuck, then other dozer comes to help, then he gets stuck coming out, so another dozer comes over and pushes him out ,hen gets stuck himself and in-turn pushed out by the cat dozer (first dozer stuck. see a trend? i got fed up so, i go swimming for the winch cable (it was under over 2ft of mud and water) and pull it out with my work truck. done.

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:

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 .

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.

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?