Bulldozer Performance Expectations

When Intel announced its first Core microarchitecture CPUs, we saw a number of charts that looked like this:

Intel used performance-per-watt to compare the efficiency of its new architecture to its predecessors. AMD is unveiling Bulldozer's performance target in a similar way, by looking at performance-per-watt:

In the client desktop/notebook space, Bulldozer will have around 1.3x better performance per watt than Barcelona. AMD also indicated that Bulldozer will deliver as much as 1.5 - 2.0x better performance per watt in the server and HPC space when compared to Barcelona.



Better efficiency is obviously important, but absolute performance can't be ignored which is why AMD tagged Bulldozer with the line: "designed to be the highest performing single and multi-threaded compute core in history."

Bulldozer will have to go up against Intel's Nehalem core, which to recap is a dramatically evolved member of the Core architecture.

The AMD Memory Roadmap: DDR3, FBD and G3MX Examined Bobcat
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  • kilkennycat - Friday, July 27, 2007 - link

    Highly likely that nVidia will solve this problem at both high and low end with their next family of GPUs. Stay tuned for the end of 2007. The first part out of the chute is also likely not to be the highest end but that which replaces the 8800GTS at a price close to $200 with full HD hardware decode... nVidia is very well aware of the cost-performance hole left by both AMD/ATI and themselves in their current GPU line.
  • strikeback03 - Friday, July 27, 2007 - link

    with that Phenom demo box, I think they have finally found use for a 1000W+ power supply
  • Spoelie - Friday, July 27, 2007 - link

    Given the size of the heatsink on the cpu, I'd venture power consumption is inline with other engineering samples, 120w or less max TDP
  • Spoelie - Friday, July 27, 2007 - link

    Oh my bad, you're right when taking the three 2900XTs in consideration.

    Where's my edit button :(
  • Spoelie - Friday, July 27, 2007 - link

    At least 2 times in the article, the text builds up anticipation for a graph, but it never comes, the most telling example is on page 6, but one or two pages before it it happened also. Both graphs are supposed to be from Intel.
  • Justin Case - Monday, August 13, 2007 - link

    Exactly. They say "Two years ago Intel used the following chart to illustrate the need for multi-core CPUs", and then the image is an AMD slide, not an Intel graph.
  • Omega215D - Thursday, July 26, 2007 - link

    If they plan to integrate an on die PCIe controller on the CPU how would this affect overclocking?
  • Regs - Friday, July 27, 2007 - link

    I'd imagine just like how it was when AMD intergrated the memory controller, mobo makers will just have to add more bios options.
  • yacoub - Thursday, July 26, 2007 - link

    While paging through the article, the thing that stood out most to me was the AMD graphic on page 5 supposedly demonstrating how much more performance Bulldozer is going to offer without a single number on the graph. I guess they want us to measure its performance increases in pixels. hehe :)
  • LTG - Thursday, July 26, 2007 - link

    Anand you're really good at distilling out the bottom line from massive amounts of marketing talk and slide ware.

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