AMD: Sea Islands R1100 (8*** series) Speculation/ Rumour Thread

but if you get a native 2m/4c (enhanced) bulldozer running at over 5ghz, it's still quite good and most importantly dirt cheap.
bulldozer is not horrible, it's just not good enough.

 

And yet a 5Ghz 2m4c Bulldozer will still get smacked around by a 4Ghz CPU based on Intels Sandy Bridge.

And I dred to think of the power consumption at 5Ghz.

Bulldozer is horrible compared to everything else.

There's faster, cheaper and more efficient chips out there so why use Bulldozer?

 

Semiaccurate reported it's pretty likely that it's PPC plus GCN.

GCN is a surprise, I didn't think that would get moved into XBOX next gen design, being so young. I expected NI/VLIW4, but I guess with GCN supporting C++ AMP, and I guess with MS wanting to leverage C++ AMP in their toolchain, that they would want that in the box that's going to define gaming performance for the next 5 years.

I wonder if the new chip will be a 32nm PPC chip with a 28nm TSMC chip all together on one module, or it'll be a blended design with 32nm GCN. If it's 32nm GCN, I wonder what effect will that have on clocks, voltages?

 

GCN for the next xbox doesn't surprise me. Just look at Xenos compared to PC GPU's of the time - in that way they're being somewhat conservative...

 

Any chance we'll see DX12 in the next round of graphics chips?

 

Do you have a link handy as to what's scheduled for the surely already final DX12 specs?

 

[offtopic]

He is not talking about current year 2011 bulldozer, but much later, much different core.

Current bulldozer has problems. None of the big problems are "fundamental" things that cannot be fixed without major design. It just needs better caches and some minor tweaks (to get better ipc), more mature manufacturing technology and optimizing some speed paths(to get clock speed up and power consumption down).

And no, smaller cpu with higher IPC does not make sense if clock speeds would be much slower
or operating voltages much higher.
Bulldozer tries to balance IPC and clock speed, but unfortunately the current first implementation failed on both.

However, such implementation failures on chip with shorter pipeline would have just resulted in even worse performance, as clock speeds would have been much slower.

1) You don't understand the difference between chip and core.

2) There are not faster, cheaper and more efficient chips out there than those amd cores that are coming after 2.5 years.

3) Intel will soon come out with faster, more efficient CORES than those AMD cores that are coming after 2.5 years, but
a) you cannot get those with a decent integrated GPU.
b) those will cost more.

 

Taken to PM..

 

I just figured if HD 2xxx-4xxx were DX10 and HD 5xxx-7xxx were DX11 then surely HD 8xxx ought to be the first DX12 GPU by right of being the fourth in the series since DX11 was release. I guess I am eternally hopeful!

 

I would expect DX12 about a year after xbox3 lands.

 

Intel is totally out of the picture so it's a non-issue. The only other choice is customized PPC as it is now. So it's either IBM or AMD. I'd personally root for PPC, but EnhancedBD wouldn't be such a bad choice either given it's proly much cheaper than anything IBM can offer.

5GHz isn't that far from reach

That's only your opinion and it's only the first implementation we are talking about, mind you that consoles don't need absolute performance -- at all.

Faster, definitely. Cheaper? I seriously doubt that.

 

Intel 2500k - £170
AMD FX 8150 - £200

In terms of instructions per clock the 2500k is a good 50%+ faster then an FX 8150 while being cheaper.

 

Cheaper for Intel, but how much it costs the console manufacturer might be a different story.

 

2500k doesn't actually finish ahead of the 8150 in many gaming benchmarks, whatever that's worth.

 

I am not sure, if turning the graphics to "low" is the right thing to do general benchmarking. Oftentimes, there's also geometric detail, animation quality and physics reduced - things that load the CPU.

It's much more sensible in my opinion, to run with full details but lower resolution and with AA/AF turned off, like for example computerbase did:
http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/...dozer/17/#abschnitt_spiele_geringe_aufloesung
and additionally with higher resolution, because no one plays at 640 x 480 these days any more.
http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/...ulldozer/16/#abschnitt_spiele_hohe_aufloesung

 

We all are forgetting that console version of BD won't need that much L3 cache and many of server oriented stuff. This will make BD module very cheap to manufacture. I think best will be to look at how good/bad Trinity will come out compared to other CPU's.
Besides theoretical throughput and FMA4 support should benefit closed systems from the get go, where all applications will use them because there won't be another manufacturer not supporting them / requiring different optimizations. Also idea of having 2 or more Int to 1 FP for consoles should make even more sense than on desktop. Especially when more and more FP intensive computations can be taken over by GPU part of closed system.

 

bulldozer is a fine chip , i'm sure amd can fix whatever is wrong with it by the time the xbox next hits .

Also lets not forget that alot of its power consumption problems is due ot the process and not the chips , amd has had problems with llano on the same process

 

It won't in games that are mainly GPU limited, Chuck in 2, 3 or even 4 graphics cards and the 2500k will easily push double the frame rates.

And games that are only single or dual threaded the 2500k walks all over it..

The 2500k is so much faster for less money it's not even funny...

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/11/03/amd_fx8150_multigpu_gameplay_performance_review/2

No matter the price bracket Intel offers the best bang per buck..

 

No it's not. That being said, this isn't the thread to discuss it. So let's move this talk to the thread(s) dedicated to BD...or the next console CPU...

 

And just how many enthusiast class graphics cards do you think a company like Microsoft would stick into a 299 or 399 USD console? I'm going to go out on a limb and say Zero.

Hence, Bulldozer would be just fine if it was cheap enough and the power envelope fit within the power budget of the console. Or an Intel CPU or an IBM CPU.

Regards,
SB