AMD Bulldozer review thread.

^^^ Scalia blog link warning!

 

I read of it crashing with Deus Ex HR too.

 

Lol well it's hard to feel sorry for someone who bought a bulldozer. Seriously, has anyone bought one of these things?

 

I think the hard times for AMD will just come. Until now some people at least hoped for a cheap AM3 upgrade from Phenoms. Today there is zero reason to stay with AMD.

When i recall they wanted to EOL the phenoms and replace them witht oversized faildozzer. What a joke. 2 billion transistor salvaged 4-cores anyone Probably that wont happen .

Maybe new record earnings again for intel ?

 

Maybe they'll release a dual sockets mobo and cut price of BD chips in half.

 

45nm Phenoms with power gating and a turbo mode would make infinitely better desktop parts than 32nm Bulldozer, and AMD could have put them out ages ago.

The FX processors are so bad it's incredible, and there's nothing like Intel's tick-tock strategy to cushion AMD from process or architecture issues.

I'm so glad I ditched AMD and bought a SB now, despite that SATA recall PITA.

 

Well, Phenom II X6 is already 45nm and has turbo. It isn't exactly serious a Core i7 competitor in the majority of cases. Maybe you meant 32nm version.

 

This is sad and amusing in equal measure.

I hope the CPU division's culture of failure doesn't infect the GPU division.

 

Well, I would suggest at least a mild overclock. Something like 4.2GHz is not going to kill a 2600k any time soon nor will a q6600 die at 3GHz. Think of your q6600 and also the new sandy bridges as factory *under*clocked products. They do it to put a favorable power consumption figure on their marketting. Also they can do it because they have little competition. Practically every q6600 overclocks at least to 3 GHz without even touching the voltage... And I have yet to hear about a 2600k that can not reach 4.6 with any kind of after market cooler. Many go 5GHz and beyond...

My q6600 was rock solid for 3 years running at 3.2GHz and to my knowledge still runs happily at that setting on its new owner´s machine.

Why not just get a 2600k now and upgrade to IB later? Most 1155 motherboards should be compatible and in fact my motherboard (gene-z) already has a beta bios with support for IB! I think they should be released around april 2012 but they may not need to release them as they have no competition...

Resistance is futile. You know you want to have new hardware. Doooo eett! You´ll get over 9000 more 3dmarks 06, quaranteed!

That said. If your budget allows and you´re hungry for those new 6 core monsters, waiting for SNB-E may be ok. But I can´t think of many applications that would need much more than 16GB ram for a while. Well, of course a nice big ramdrive would be cool

 

You won't get PCIe gen 3 support that way, right? Or is that only for the LGA 2011 chips?

-FUDie

 

Well, gen3 1155 motherboards are actually just starting to roll out...
for example:
ASRock Z68 Extreme3 Gen3
ASUS P8Z68 DELUXE/GEN3

And yeah. I almost see it fitting that this thread is derailed to discussion about when to purchase Intel hardware. There´s not much to discuss about these dozers. I think even performance of them is next to irrelevant, much of those reviews are largely irrelevant when you can not run a system on that platform and expect it to consistently start running any game without crashing to bsod.

Did any reviewer experiment if they can run Shogun2 / Deus ex after disabling cores?

Maybe there should be a thread where all bulldozer incompatible apps and games are listed...
I keep seeing more and more reports:

http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showpost.php?p=6993098&postcount=84

Miles Marx at that scali blogs comments:

And why in the seven hells is there not a bigger press scandal made about this? Customers should be warned clearly not to buy defective products! Yes, I see this as a big problem. It would certainly be a very bad thing for me personally to not be able to run a single title of my Steam library, much more so a great one such as Deus Ex...

 

If there are widespread compatibility issues I think you can count on the shit hitting the fan soon. I find it hard to believe that AMD may have skimped on adequate validation. It would be suicide.

 

My guess would be because it's still new, it needs to be documented properly, people are expecting a workaround to surface, and perhaps people just don't want to kick a man when he's down.

 

Maybe you should try Google. And make sure you put in "-intel", because you wouldn't want the list cluttered with the Intel systems failing in precisely the same way.

http://forums.tweaktown.com/asrock/44772-asrock-z68-extreme-4-bsod-clock-interrupt-not-received.html

Seems to be a motherboard problem, not a CPU problem.

---

I hope the next graphics cards are ready for IB, looks like that's what I'll be building in the new year.

 

Nope, I meant 45 nm! Phenom II X4's don't have any kind of turbo, and they made up the vast majority of all Phenom sales. Phenom II X6's have a crude turbo mode that overvolts everything and shuts down nothing. Neither has power gating.

Power gating and a more evolved turbo mode would have allowed them to push clocks higher. For instance, shutting down 4 cores on an X6 and boosting 2 cores plus maybe the L3 / mem controller (shown to make a difference in games) would have extended Phenom's lead over Bulldozer even further, and we wouldn't have had to wait till the end of 2011 for them.

Some similarly improved X4s (possibly with a smaller but faster L3 for desktop use) wouldn't have hurt either.

 

Well. Sweclockers ran Shogun 2 test successfully with Phenom II but using the same motherboard Bulldozer crashed. Looking at their test setup the only logical conclusion is that they used same motherboard for both Phenom and Bulldozer.

I´m not saying other hardware can´t get same kind of error in some situations. Just that that processor seems to get that error every time very consistently and I find that worrying.

Well, honestly if I was making a review and part of the review apps would fail to run, the review would stop there. There would be no conclusion. Product would get turd award pending a solution.

 

Well if Shogun 2 or another program is crashing very frequently on all BD CPUs you can expect a forum somewhere to explode. I don't see anything yet...

 

Ironically, the cheaper current S1155 boards have a good chance of PCIe 3 support while many higher end boards, especially those using P67, will not.

http://event.asus.com/2011/mb/PCIe3_Ready/

 

I don't see how Phenom being fine implies that Bulldozer will be fine.

We'll just have to wait and see if a BIOS or driver update fixes the problem.

There definitely needs to be a stink over faulty products being sold, but history indicates its most probably a motherboard problem, not a CPU problem.

EDIT:

Amusing addendum, seen "with Bulldozer":

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums...-and-FX-8150&p=4979440&viewfull=1#post4979440

 

Do you guys thing the Phenom X6 will scale well in the next couple of years? Right now I understand that most games are pretty crude in their multicore optimization, but going forward do you see the X6 becoming more competitive with the quad core Sandy Bridges for gaming?

I'm gonna upgrade real soon (after I know how BF3 runs on my current system) and I can save a couple hundred $$ by going the AMD route.