Tuesday 25 October 2011

Trinity, Llano on steroids

It looks like after the unfortunate performance Bulldozer came out with, there is at least some good news coming out.
The 7000 series radeons should be out before christmas, which would be a nice addition but in this article i'm focusing on Trinity, the successor to Llano.
As a bit of a back story, Llano used the K10 architecture from the Phenoms, capable of a decent workload and with graphics on die it was a very good budget desktop.
Trinity is hoping to expand on this by making it more powerful, the x86 cores are going to be 2nd Generation Bulldozer cores. (Here's hoping it's the B2 stepping at least)
On the graphics side of things, AMD are hoping for a 30% increase in the performance, which seems odd considering the original quote was 50%,  but we're going to assume that AMDs engineers aren't going to be as optimistic after the release of Bulldozer.
A main concern of these particular chips is that if they're going to be using the Bulldozer modules then are put into laptops, they better have sorted the power consumption for the power consumption were seeing from the full Bulldozer chips is outrageous if you're planning on putting that into a mobile unit.
It'd be nice to see how this chip would perform in comparison to the Llano, I won't be buying one but it's good to see AMD continuing with some products that will have a market.
My next blogs will be on Ivy Bridge, and then who knows.
Hope you enjoyed the post.
Until next time.

Wednesday 19 October 2011

Bulldozer: The Aftermath

Since all the official benchmarks have now been released, we know about how Bulldozer has been competing. Unfortunately, it's not great.
After all this time it's still having to compete with the i5 2500k, sure in some places it gets ahead but it general it doesn't balance out as a great chip, the IPC is even beaten by the Phenoms, which is never a good sign. A new stepping, B3 should be coming out soon, not soon enough if you ask me.
We need to know more about this stepping to see what kind of improvements it could make, there have been claims that a registry fix is also necessary to improve Bulldozer, improvements of 40% have also been claimed, but you'd expect that such an improvement could not be entirely down to the registry.
I'm sure new benchmarks will come out with the stepping, hopefully affecting that huge power drain and the TDP, people are still buying the chip regardless of it's current problems, if there is such an improvement with this second stepping.. I wonder how those people will feel, they've been through a lot already if they're still willing to by the chip.
That's all for now, more ranting and raving at a later date.
Have a nice day.

Wednesday 12 October 2011

Bulldozer took it's time.

Looks like the bulldozer modules are finally here, Zambezi has arrived.
The unfortunate point is that the benchmarks may not be as promising as previously expected, this being let down in some amount by the architecture of the chip, for even in the FX-8150 there are only four FPU schedulers, which is even less than the 1100T, the highest rated Phenom. Where the FX does begin to pull back some ground is when rendering, video compression and conversion are involved, the multiple modules and cores really having an impact on the performance.
I've been waiting all this time to see what I should build my new pc as, I expected more from the Bulldozer, considering this is the flagship chip, and to see it lose out to the i5 2500k and even the 1100T in tests isn't good. In the end it comes down to what you want to do with the chip.
Although in the future, the sound of bulldozer modules housed in an APU does sound promising, as long as they put a few more FPUs in there and keep the prices down, i'm sure we'll all be happy.

I'll be updated a lot more regularly, keep posted.
Until next time.