That's true, but demands of a CPU in the market have changed dramatically. Agree on prices for sure, but I'm guessing they're still selling somewhere or the prices would drop.
The way I see it is that AMD made a judgment call 4-5 years ago and assumed that software progression would keep up with and even out-pace an ever-upward-scaling core count in the computing world that would try to feed the software that favored moar coars over IPC. It was a piss-poor call. Somewhere along the way somebody should have said "Hey, wait a minute. Maybe we were overly optimistic in our assessment." Instead, they stuck with it and the delays were both due to GloFo as well as an attempt to cover up the poor performance -- I think that's why it's got so much damn cache and was about 2 years too late.
I think they can certainly do quite a bit to patch it up, but what it's going to require and the amount of time that's needed is another story. They wanted to hold IPC the same with Bulldozer but missed that mark by -10%. In certain cases, a 2500K beats an 8150 by 40-50% in single-threaded performance. That's absolutely atrocious and they quite simply don't have a chance in hell of closing that gap with Piledriver nor Steamroller. I'm guessing they'll try their best by addressing the uberslow cache speeds, bump up stock clocks and that will allow Piledriver to do well in highly-threaded workloads and get close to or even slightly beat the 2600K (remember, that was the whole intent of CMT anyway) but will still display its weaknesses in low-threaded applications but by a smaller margin
What will be really interesting is to see if there was something that was missed and can be improved within the fetch/decoder within a module so that -20% performance hit within-module can be mitigated. I think any changes for the better on that end will help them tremendously as far as highly-threaded workloads go. Basically, attempt to make CMT look less like CMT as far as benchmarks go but still advantageous on the fab and $$ side.
edit:
Just want to add that if you see Piledriver stock clock speeds increased drastically (and judging by the Trinity APUs that does look to be the case) I'd be extremely wary of any significant IPC increases. What they did was lengthen the pipeline and increase the latencies (the cache being the biggie here) so the high clock speeds was something that Bulldozer required in order to make up for that intended IPC halt. Higher clock speeds at lower TDP likely means the cache speeds haven't been addressed and instead they're ramping up the clock speeds on a more refined process in order to make up some ground in per-core performance. Those would be the bad signs.
Unfortunately it seems that's exactly what AMD did. I ran the numbers on Trinity's clock speed in comparison to Llano (both 65W TDP variants and not including Turbo) and AMD's estimates pointed to a ~20-30% increase in PCmark Vantage, which roughly equated to the increase in clock speed from Llano to Trinity. In short, if we're to assume these xbit graphs and AMD performance estimates are accurate, we'd be looking at Trinity equaling Llano's IPC and that performance improvement would be a direct result of higher clock speeds. That's a good sign even though I just stated it's a bad sign (!) and in essence should have been what Bulldozer brought to the table because this was the initial plan for Bulldozer from the get-go, but it also paints a poor picture going forward because they'll HAVE to change their approach from clock speeds to IPC increases due to their slow progression and limitations on the fab front. It looks as if they took the easy road and just bumped up clock speeds with a minor IPC increase to overcome Bulldozer's initial shortcomings. It looks as if it's a step in the right direction for the short term, but long term they'll require a complete overhaul in approach.
The good sign (better sign, imo) would be a leveling off of clock speeds on a smaller node (not happening until 2013 at the earliest) and a decrease in TDP on CPUs rather than APUs. It's a bit more difficult to judge the APUs because of how strong AMD's graphical performance is and just how it would affect the entire chip. There's also the issue of whether we'll even see any more AMD CPUs for the desktop after Vishera. According to their slides on FA day they're planning to replace them all with APUs going forward.
adding even more to this
http://www.ilsistemista.net/index.p...omparison-whats-wrong-with-amd-bulldozer.html
Not very good grammar (seems to be foreign), but the dude does a good job of gathering info from many sources and puts it together really well.
the funny part, is that amd had a good profit in the last 2 years, even with faildozer...amd profits is just near to the days of the athlon 64
And most of that coming from APUs/CPUs and embedded devices.
They barely make any money off their best products, discrete GPUs.
the funny part, is that amd had a good profit in the last 2 years, even with faildozer...amd profits is just near to the days of the athlon 64
I haven't died yet, but past results are not indicative of future results. In fact there is one future result that I can count on, I will not see the year 2100, and history strongly implies that neither will Intel.
In a poorly constructed Heisenberg uncertainty principle analogy, neither Intel nor I know how we will end up in that end-state, the journey itself is unknown, but the destination is definite and unavoidable
True...but...there was a time when Intel was the one that was dwarfed 6:1 by entrenched incumbents in the business machine industry and they managed to deftly outmaneuver them.
If we look to the history of business in just about every industry and segment what we see is a fairly cyclical rise and fall of industry titans who started out as a feeble upstart pushing against well monied competitors, they rise by out-innovating and out-competing, then they get bloated and begin to rest on their laurels, and the cycle repeats.
What is unique about Intel is merely the moment in time at which we are assessing their trajectory on that arc.
True there are many more examples of business that basically failed to blossom, in a lot of ways AMD is a prime example of a business that exhibited stunted growth at every turn in the cycle.
Few companies manage to reinvent themselves frequently enough to stay relevant though, despite being industry titans. See Eastman Kodak, or DEC.
I am convinced that Intel owns the CMOS industry up to the point that silicon xtors cease to scale.
But look around in this industry and what you won't see is leaders of CMOS who were also leaders of vacuum tubes. You could kinda say IBM is like that but not really, they are a software and services company first, hardware is a distant third.
They survived the transition by reinventing themselves and ceasing to exist as a hardware leader in the exact ways that DEC and Cray failed.
I will be extremely surprised if Intel is still the defacto technology and hardware leader in the computing industry 50yrs from now. History is against them every bit as much as it is against all of us.
I haven't died yet, but past results are not indicative of future results. In fact there is one future result that I can count on, I will not see the year 2100, and history strongly implies that neither will Intel.
In a poorly constructed Heisenberg uncertainty principle analogy, neither Intel nor I know how we will end up in that end-state, the journey itself is unknown, but the destination is definite and unavoidable
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