Pricing Revealed for First AMD Bulldozer FX Chips

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• BhargavaRam - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link

  Hi Anand, Andrew,
  
  Been Eagerly waiting for a review of the chip, When will it be published??

• BSMonitor - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link

  3.6GHz and turbo 4.2GHz.. Yeah, lack of competition has definitely put the 4GHZ mark on the back burner. I believe Anand even had 2600K's running 4.5GHz on air.. It won't be long. Ivy bridge will definitely have a 4 GHz part.

• mackintire - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link

  Interesting posts here. Most all these questions have been discussed before. Generally it is the assumption that Bulldozer will be close (possibly ever so slightly below) the performance of the first gen i7 processors. In some heavily threaded application a 8 core bulldozer will beat a 4 core hyper threaded first gen i7. Since most applications are not heavily threaded, this makes bulldozer a mixed bag on the desktop. Keep in mind this is a Server chip that is being offered on the desktop. The Server market is where AMD intends to make a pile of cash. If they can sell more bulldozers by marketing them at a great price point to normal consumers..... Great.
  
  In short,
  Expect AMD to be competitive with all the i5's and the bottom of the second gen i7's.
  
  Later,
  
  Mackintire

• rickcain2320 - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link

  AMD is cheaper. The only reason I even have a Q6600 right now is a friend of mine sold me the chip for less than the cost of a meal at chinese restaurant. I just don't like intel price/performance.
  The Bulldozer looks great to me.

• neilrued - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - link

  Hello rickcain2320,
  
  I agree, AMD's price performance ratio has always been better than Intel's. For the CPU cores aimed at the high to extreme performance market segments, Intel CPUs are too expensive compared with AMD's CPUs, for intelligent average income people who want to build their own PC.
  
  Even though for floating point intensive applications, the Intel CPUs' have always had the lead over AMD, for gamers these days, the gaming performance of a PC relies much more on the graphics card performance, than CPU floating point performance.
  
  For business owners doing their accounting, it doesn't matter if they are using a notebook with a dual core AMD, or Intel CPU. The accounting software doesn't require Gigaflops to run.
  
  Unless an user is planning on modelling the complex atomic level chemical interaction of carbon based polymers, to reduce the side effects of pharmaceutical drugs, model the evolution of the Universe by deriving detailed galactic models to better understand the role of Dark Matter, model the deuterium/tritium plasma behavior applying Chaos Theory inside an experimental thermonuclear fusion reactor for understanding how to improve the fusion time; there seems to be not much point in discussing the benefits of floating point performance.
  
  The earlier reviews between the Intel and AMD Llano APUs, demonstrated how a superior graphics gaming performance depends much more on GPU rather that CPU floating point performance. More recently the newer AMD Trinity APU showed a superior performance over Intel's APU due to the absence of stutter.
  
  I am hoping that with AMD's new Bulldozer CPU core, they have finally managed to improve the floating point performance, to at least match if not beat Intel benchmark for benchmark, and sell the higher performance market segment CPUs for less than Intel.
  
  My other hope is that in 2012 AMD releases an APU with a dual graphics processing core, an 8 core CPU running at 5.2 GHz without overclocking, and with the CPU cores having floating point performance matching Intel's. The dual graphics processing core should demonstrate a significant gaming performance improvement over the current Trinity graphics processing core.
  
  I am neither an AMD or Intel "fanboy", my choice in CPU is driven by cost to performance ratios. What happens is everytime I purchase a laptop, I have twice bought a laptop with Intel processors. When I build a desktop system, I have built six systems, two for a former employer, and I always selected AMD CPUs, and I have never had any issues with performance.
  
  I recall when I built the two systems for one of my former employers, they were typical corporate thinkers; use only Intel. This somehow translated into a distrust of AMD processor products in the minds of some of the staff, including my former Supervisor, which was odd because he is an Electronics Engineer like me. They thought that since AMD was cheaper than Intel, that meant lower quality or inferior product.
  
  The company was slow in upgrading their systems, and the executives would get their desktops upgraded, the managers would then get the best executive hand-me-downs, then the supervisors would get the managers and executive hand-me-downs. I used to work in the Engineering Department, and I got the bottom of the barrel obsolete Intel motherboards. I was required to build a mini server to log massive amounts of experimental data from different systems. We tried using an older Intel system, but it was slow in handling the lab data backups, and would miss some data.
  
  At that time, I coincidentally happened to upgrade two home PCs, and had a spare 900MHz and 1.8GHz Athlon CPUs with their motherboards. I spoke with the company's IT specialist contractor, and he did not mind me building the AMD based PCs, installing the OS, and installing the applications software, provided I took the responsibility if there were any problems with the two AMD based systems.
  
  I did a swap with the IT specialist contractor for spare laptop parts, and he told me he could only give me parts that he couldn't guarantee would be working properly. The only part from this junk pile I could get to work was a DVD writer, which was fine because I was able to upgrade my first laptop's CD writer.
  
  The faster 1.8GHz AMD system was used as our lab server, and the slower 900MHz system was used as a data logging PC for old manufacturing equipment rescued from storage; its original PC was reassigned to an executive's desk years before.
  
  The 1.8GHz AMD system was performing so well, my Supervisor was impressed; he also used the server daily to look at the results for experiments he was running. His jaw dropped when I told him our new server was using an AMD CPU. For several weeks, every day he double checked the data, and compared the data logged by some Intel PCs with the AMD server, and each time noticed there were no discrepancies, no missing data. Once he concluded he could trust the new server, he stopped double checking, although at the time he didn't say anything to me. A week or so later the IT specialist contractor advised me that a comparably fast Intel based system was available, if we wanted to swap it for the mini lab server. I suggested to my Supervisor I could remove the new mini lab server, and his response was that there was no good reason to replace it. He even seemed to be defensive when I teased him that I could stay back and replace it with the Intel based one. He was very happy with the performance of the new mini lab file server because it made him look good in the eyes of management, and didn't want even me messing with it. What gave him such confidence in the mini lab server, was after he stopped double checking on it, he'd ask me to progressively add additional lab data from each PC data logger, and for me to double check there was no missing data. Eventually all of the lab PCs were backing up their data to the mini server, and the mini server never missed any data, no matter how much data it had to collect.