Why did AMD release bulldozer if they can still make good CPU's?

[ElFenix]

But then why stick with the plan to release things like Steamroller and Excavator? 6 months before release, AMD would have known that Bulldozer was a dud. But why continue development on the idea? Why not abandon it, when it was clear that it was not working?

iirc piledriver was the last of the construction cores to have significant resources expended on it from an engineering standpoint. steamroller and excavator had much of their planned resources taken to use on (presumably) zen.

it would have been interesting to see what an actual die-shrink would have been able to do for the construction cores.

 

[A///]

Last time I tried that i got an error, but must have done it right today when i tested it out. How long has the "insert quotes" button been here? I only noticed it over the weekend.

Forever? It's a native feature of the software, Xenforo. It's been around since its beta about six or seven years ago.

 

[CatMerc]

iirc piledriver was the last of the construction cores to have significant resources expended on it from an engineering standpoint. steamroller and excavator had much of their planned resources taken to use on (presumably) zen.

it would have been interesting to see what an actual die-shrink would have been able to do for the construction cores.

Interesting, though I doubt it would get AMD anywhere they needed to be.
Bulldozer just had so many terrible decisions baked into the architecture, all inter-connected, that getting it to perform well might as well have been a complete re-architecturing of the design.

The result by Excavator might have looked like a hybrid of Zen and Excavator, but it would be worse than what we have now.

 

[JimKiler]

I just listened to a yourtube video

and they focus on the Bulldozer and how after 5 years it actually surpasses Intel's 2500K in performance so the narrrator is saying all the 1080p tests are a crock because Ryzen will get better with age.

Check out the 2nd graph on this page

https://www.computerbase.de/2017-03/amd-ryzen-1800x-1700x-1700-test/4/

It shows this year the FX 8370 surpasses the 2500K. In other words it only took 5 years for coding and multicores to catch up to the Bulldozer architecture. I believe some of the comments in this thread said BD was ahead of its time.

Thoughts?

 

[Geegeeoh]

It takes years to make any change... work on Zen started soon after Bulldozer was released if not before, but still they needed to keep the business going meanwhile and get some money back.

 

[guachi]

With the pace of CPUs slower, taking five years to "catch up" to Ryzen isn't a bad thing as Ryzen is good out of the gate, unlike Bulldozer. (Note: I own an 8350 but held off until last year when it became clear it was a steal at $100 for better than 2500K performance).

In other word, I think the YouTube video is correct. And since Intel's offerings are overpriced we are left with Ryzen 7 being the only logical choice to purchase for future gaming.

Buy a Ryzen 7. Keep for 5+ years. Pocket the savings for a GPU that can push the CPU. Maybe in this hypothetical future you'll have two GPU manufacturers to choose from, too.

 

[kalmquist]

Check out the 2nd graph on this page

https://www.computerbase.de/2017-03/amd-ryzen-1800x-1700x-1700-test/4/

It shows this year the FX 8370 surpasses the 2500K. In other words it only took 5 years for coding and multicores to catch up to the Bulldozer architecture. I believe some of the comments in this thread said BD was ahead of its time.

Thoughts?

The FX 8370 is Piledriver, not Bulldozer. There were a lot of flaws in Bulldozer, some of which were fixed in Piledriver.

Also, the 2500K has hyperthreading disabled for market segmentation purposes. If you need 8 threads, the 2600K (same silicon as the 2500K, but with hyperthreading enabled) will generally run those 8 threads faster than Bulldozer.

In other words, Bulldozer was a really bad design, given the competitive environment. It was better at some things than others, but it was inferior to Sandy Bridge no matter what you were doing.