How bad was AMD Bulldozer and its variants

[2is]

They were terrible. Not only could 8 AMD cores not outperform 4 Intel cores but they also consumed 2x the power. Some people say they got better with time. I say they got worse. They used to trail i5's and i7's initially, towards they end they were trailing i3's in many work loads.

 

[Madpacket]

I liked the 8320e and 8300. On a sale you could typically find them for under $120.00, or often for less or with a decent game. Combo deals at Microcenter were stupid cheap as well. As long as you keep them at 4.2Ghz or less at around 1.35V they're pretty power efficient for such dated processors. Also the 8 cores have given them staying power. Most of of the 83xx builds I put together are still use today without many complaints.

Sure there's the odd poorly optimized game like like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds that make them look bad but many of the newer titles scale well with additional cores, and newer Freesync monitors with wide ranges help iron out uneven or large swings in framerates.

If I was buying new today on the lower end I would likely be looking at the entry level ZEN processors (Intel dual core CPU's don't really cut it anymore) as a starting point instead of Bulldozer though.

 

[SlowSpyder]

They were terrible. Not only could 8 AMD cores not outperform 4 Intel cores but they also consumed 2x the power. Some people say they got better with time. I say they got worse. They used to trail i5's and i7's initially, towards they end they were trailing i3's in many work loads.

They were decent for tweakers. I can run my FX9370 at 4.4GHz and ~1.2v. At that frequency and voltage I used under 100 watts of power benchmarking multi-threaded applications, and in those well threaded benches I'd leave i5's behind. I've used PLENTY of i3's, i5's and a handful of i7's over the years. The reality was I'd put the FX in the same performance category as an i5, capable but not going to set any benchmark records. Sure, they used more power, but I'm convinced that is only a much bigger deal on internet forums than in real life (datacenters and 24x7 crunchers not included in that statement).

 

[NTMBK]

They were decent for tweakers. I can run my FX9370 at 4.4GHz and ~1.2v. At that frequency and voltage I used under 100 watts of power benchmarking multi-threaded applications, and in those well threaded benches I'd leave i5's behind. I've used PLENTY of i3's, i5's and a handful of i7's over the years. The reality was I'd put the FX in the same performance category as an i5, capable but not going to set any benchmark records. Sure, they used more power, but I'm convinced that is only a much bigger deal on internet forums than in real life (datacenters and 24x7 crunchers not included in that statement).

Unfortunately power matters a lot for laptops, too. Bulldozer basically cost AMD the entire laptop market for 5 years, outside of the super cheap Jaguar chips.

 

[krumme]

It was really a freakshow period for amd with a huge contrast to bobcat.
They made a desktop cpu that was twice as big and used twice as much power and was a good deal slower than a i7.
At the same time we got bobcat that had an ipc and perf that was 60% faster than atom and at the same time far smaller !. Made on tscm cheap 45nm process vs Intel 32nm. A blast and a huge success on the market. 28nm came way to late for it and later Intel killed all the x86 mobile market with its 4b destruction army.

 

[amd6502]

Yet cat dual cores were way too underpowered (which is a shame when it's soldered on boards). I don't know why they didn't make triple core cat as budget APU in place, and reserve the dual core die harvest for embedded (with maybe a few going to desktop as AM1 upgrade traps).

They did finally fix the efficiency and battery life problems with Excavator. So you had lousy situation in mobile starting H2 2012 until Carrizo was released in H2 2015 (That's a little over three years, yet with the reputation impact, maybe closer to four years). A friend has a A10-9600p and it is impressively efficient and good (as long as top and boost frequency is disabled when unplugged) and has good battery life even with a tiny 3 cell battery.

Kaveri (BD3) was very disappointing energy efficiency wise; I'm guessing Piledriver laptops must have been even worse. I'm using a A10 Kaveri laptop which replaced my Llano A6 quad laptop. Though the Llano had a higher 35W TDP (vs 19W), it would clock all the way down to 0.8GHz and be wonderfully efficient at 1GHz. When limiting the clocks to 1.2GHz under battery profile, I think Llano was probably more efficient than my Kaveri at comparable performance (limiting clocks to 1.4GHz); it definitely had far better battery life.

 

[Thunder 57]

Unfortunately power matters a lot for laptops, too. Bulldozer basically cost AMD the entire laptop market for 5 years, outside of the super cheap Jaguar chips.

I think a lot of the blame fell on the OEMs as well. Trinity was decent but Kaveri onward had some nice laptop chips that were just hard to find in actual use. Even Bristol Ridge today isn't all that bad.

That said, Raven Ridge should blow them away in terms of performance and performance/watt. It looks like a real win for laptops.

 

[mtcn77]

What I don't understand is why the vrm circuitry cannot find the near voltage threshold level like how analog vrms stabilize the current. Apu chips can be manually optimised, but are uniformly untrained. I fail to reason why.

 

[jpiniero]

Even Bristol Ridge today isn't all that bad.

The thing is that laptop makers have moved to 15W by default, and Bristol Ridge throttles like mad at that level.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Speaking of Bristol Ridge, I mentioned that to a friend I was skyping with tonight, earlier, when he asked about AMD's equivalent APU/CPU to Intel's G4560.

The only answer I had for him was a 7970K APU. Then I remembered Bristol Ridge, which is on AM4, but is sadly not really available to the DIY market, unless you want to import one from Japan or wherever to the USA.

 

[majord]

The thing is that laptop makers have moved to 15W by default, and Bristol Ridge throttles like mad at that level.

Thats a bit of an exaggeration.. With the exception of a few poor oem implementations They may throttle up to a couple hundred mhz below base on sustained all-core loads, but these are pretty unrealistic scenarios.

Gaming workloads are a different scenario, when the IGP is taking a big chunk of tdp

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Then I remembered Bristol Ridge, which is on AM4, but is sadly not really available to the DIY market, unless you want to import one from Japan or wherever to the USA.

If you want Carrizo/BR on the desktop, there is also the Athlon 845 on FM2+. But it needs a basic graphics card as well. Advantage is you can use pretty much any FM2+ board, with old DDR3 RAM if you have some laying about. It doesn't care much about what speed, since there is no IGP. It's also Win7 proof, if you care about that.

 

[scannall]

One of my laptops has the A8-4500m in it. (Trinity). The way it came was with one stick of dog slow ram. Took that out, and put 2 sticks of the fastest laptop ram I could find at the time, and the difference was like night and day. It's a really great little machine. Plays my assorted MMO's really well, on decent settings when I am away from home.

 

[NTMBK]

Thats a bit of an exaggeration.. With the exception of a few poor oem implementations They may throttle up to a couple hundred mhz below base on sustained all-core loads, but these are pretty unrealistic scenarios.

Gaming workloads are a different scenario, when the IGP is taking a big chunk of tdp

...and if you don't care about gaming, then Intel is the better option due to superior CPU performance.

 

[Thunder 57]

One of my laptops has the A8-4500m in it. (Trinity). The way it came was with one stick of dog slow ram. Took that out, and put 2 sticks of the fastest laptop ram I could find at the time, and the difference was like night and day. It's a really great little machine. Plays my assorted MMO's really well, on decent settings when I am away from home.

Like I said, the OEM's bear some fault. My mom was looking for a laptop not long after Kaveri shipped. Only the low end ones seemed to be available though, so I recommended a Richland laptop. Of course I looked at Intel too, but there wasn't anything at the time that stood out, especially for what she needed.

 

[AtenRa]

They were terrible. Not only could 8 AMD cores not outperform 4 Intel cores but they also consumed 2x the power. Some people say they got better with time. I say they got worse. They used to trail i5's and i7's initially, towards they end they were trailing i3's in many work loads.

BD 8 Threads was very close to SB 8 Threads MT Loads in 2011
PD 8 Threads is faster than SB 8 Threads MT Loads in 2017

32nm PD 8 Threads is way faster in MT Loads than any Core i3 even 14nm Skylake/Kaby

 

[2is]

BD 8 Threads was very close to SB 8 Threads MT Loads in 2011
PD 8 Threads is faster than SB 8 Threads MT Loads in 2017

32nm PD 8 Threads is way faster in MT Loads than any Core i3 even 14nm Skylake/Kaby

You can go ahead and quote me cinebench and encoding results all day. If your main usage is that by all means. For 90% of applications out there my statement holds true. The remaining 10% are apps that people don't use. I'm not cherry picking MT, no need to cherry pick when you're telling the truth.

 

[formulav8]

Then I remembered Bristol Ridge, which is on AM4, but is sadly not really available to the DIY market

Yeah AMD is shooting itself in the foot not having an entry level CPU for AM4 available. Especially not offering any CPU's with an IGP. Desktop RR won't be here until early next year IIRC.

According to Anandtech's interview with the CEO in March, she said BR is definitely coming to retailers.

 

[scannall]

Yeah AMD is shooting itself in the foot not having an entry level CPU for AM4 available. Especially not offering any CPU's with an IGP. Desktop RR won't be here until early next year IIRC.
.

I have to disagree. Enthusiasts are for the most part more fault and tinker tolerant than the market at large. The larger market of people who get their computers at Best Buy don't want to wade through bios updates. Releasing the enthusiast parts first lets them identify and correct a lot of things before going to the general market. If you remember X58 when it launched, it was a huge mess. And they never did make a laptop friendly one. Laptops stuck with the Core 2 series. By the time the APU's hit the market the bios should be settled and stable for everyone.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

I have to disagree. Enthusiasts are for the most part more fault and tinker tolerant than the market at large. The larger market of people who get their computers at Best Buy don't want to wade through bios updates. Releasing the enthusiast parts first lets them identify and correct a lot of things before going to the general market. If you remember X58 when it launched, it was a huge mess. And they never did make a laptop friendly one. Laptops stuck with the Core 2 series. By the time the APU's hit the market the bios should be settled and stable for everyone.

I have to agree with you there. Also, as I've mentioned before, AMD doesn't do themselves any favours if they drag the remains of the BD fiasco over on AM4. Doing that could seriously damage the perception of the AM4 platform. Excavator performance simply isn't there. It's only a minor improvement on Steamroller after all. Even at 4GHz+, it's simply not enough. It's only redeeming quality would then be the IGP, and I doubt that would be enough.

Only way I see is if BR is kept as an ultra-low-budget product, kind of like a second revision of AM1. Because it will be absolutely destroyed by Raven Ridge.

Disclaimer, both desktop Carrizo (Athlon 845) and Ryzen owner.

 

[formulav8]

I have to disagree.

No probs. But seen people wanting BR to hold them over. So I still believe its hurting AMD not having an entry level cpu and especially not one with an IGP. Be it RR or BR.

 

[krumme]

I have to agree with you there. Also, as I've mentioned before, AMD doesn't do themselves any favours if they drag the remains of the BD fiasco over on AM4. Doing that could seriously damage the perception of the AM4 platform. Excavator performance simply isn't there. It's only a minor improvement on Steamroller after all. Even at 4GHz+, it's simply not enough. It's only redeeming quality would then be the IGP, and I doubt that would be enough.

Only way I see is if BR is kept as an ultra-low-budget product, kind of like a second revision of AM1. Because it will be absolutely destroyed by Raven Ridge.

Disclaimer, both desktop Carrizo (Athlon 845) and Ryzen owner.

Excacator is in many ways a miracle.
Made by extremely scarce budget.
On a cheap and outdated process node.
On the foundation of the "cpu from hell" aka bd.
Respect from here.
But still 50% higher perf and half the power is like 5 years forward.
I hope my next slim notebook is a RR and not the usual boring 2c stuff from Intel. Man its like i had 10 of those.
(Edit i actually had 8 pcx dual core Intel notebooks and only a single 4c i7 as variation....arggg no more 2c please...)

 

[Madpacket]

You can go ahead and quote me cinebench and encoding results all day. If your main usage is that by all means. For 90% of applications out there my statement holds true. The remaining 10% are apps that people don't use. I'm not cherry picking MT, no need to cherry pick when you're telling the truth.

I thought AdoredTV did a comparison between 83xx and 2500K where the FX held up pretty good?

 

[Topweasel]

I thought AdoredTV did a comparison between 83xx and 2500K where the FX held up pretty good?

Well the point of the video was whether low Rez benchmarking in any way indicative of future performance. It just so happened in proving that, it also showed that as time went on and benchmark suites updated, the CMT implementation started to catch up and sometimes pull out a lead.

The problem with all CPU benchmarks is that people generally always keep their settings to shift the bottleneck on the GPU and replace their cards when GPUs are struggling with games. Anything from a Phenom II and C2Q on is going to be enough to let people GPU bottleneck their cards.

The problem with BD wasn't games as much as everything else. It did well in VM setups and super highly threaded tasks. But struggled with every other productive task while using an obscene amount of power.

 

[edcoolio]

Having owned a slew of Intel and AMD, I can say that I never personally had an issue with the Bulldozer variants.

I don't give a crap about power consumption and heat is easily taken care of with the right cooler.

I have overclocked an 8320 and slapped a low/mid-range gaming card, and it will play just about anything. Far, far cheaper than Intel solutions at that level of graphics gaming, it made no noticeable difference compared to my i3's and i5's. i7's were another story, but even then, it was not that easy to notice.

They have their place, so I guess I would not call them bad at all, within their limits.

In fact, I would recommend anyone with very little money to look for a motherboard/ram/cpu combo and used case,off of fleabay with an 8320 or above, decent power supply on sale with rebate off the 'egg, and spend the rest on the graphics card/monitor.

Really, when every single cent counts, it can't be beat as a starter gaming rig on a shoestring. Lots of cores, acceptable speed, little money. One thing that drives me crazy is well meaning people that do not understand that some people just do not have that extra "$20 for a better cpu" or even an extra $5. They are at their complete maximum. Not everyone is fortunate.

I think the Bulldozer 83xx series excels in those situations.