On Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 6:09 PM, C
Think very carefully before you go out and buy the FX4100. In ALL the tests I've seen so far, it has significantly underpreformed.... so much that the AMD dual cores beat it out in almost every test. Even overclocked by 1GHz, it still can't compare.
The Bulldozer is suffering the same thing that the Pentium 4 did when it was released. The Pentium 3 had a 10 stage pipeline, whereas the Pentium 4 introduced a 20 stage pipeline. So, counting in mispredicted branches slowing it down, the 1.5Ghz P4 was basically comparable to a 1.0Ghz P3. The Pentium 4 had improved the pipeline's speed but it was slowed down due to having a longer pipeline. There was a similar issue with the Precott when it moved to 31 stages. However, there was improvements in Prescott that enabled it to be at parity with the Northwood at similar speeds. Look how much better the Pentium M(which was bascially a P3 with a P4 memory controller and a better pipeline) did vs the P4, with it's 12 stage pipeline. The Core2 went to 14. Well the Athlon64/K10 has a 12(or maybe 14) stage pipeline, Bulldozer has an 18 or 20(depending on where you read it) stage pipeline. So, we have a similar issue. AMD increased the stages, made them more efficient, and therefore Bulldozer has performance similar to(better on some things, worse on others) than the K10. However, Bulldozer is now positioned to have higher clock speeds in the future where K10 was starting to hit a wall. The Power6, with what looks like a 13stage pipeline managed 5Ghz. The Power7 has a deeper pipeline at a lower topend. So, basically, Bulldozer is meant to perform for the future. Hopefully, AMD did a better job with it than Intel did with the P4. I'm waiting on 128bit chips to come out. That's where things will go eventually for performance. Look at Intel's AVX - 256bit now with 512 & 1024 bit for the future. SSE was only 128bit(and kludged at 64bits till the Core2 thanks to the P3 design decisions). -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org