Just going through it slowly now… with my crunching hat firmly on, it doesn’t sound very appealing so far. At the same clock, you get worse FPU performance than an X6, and single thread efficiency is lower than before too. Supposedly optimised for multi-threaded workload, that’s less common in crunching… I guess integer crunching apps might see a benefit from the number of possible cores.
Still reading through so there might be more interesting stuff to come!
Just went through Xbit’s review also. They were even harsher, comparing it at one point the dual integer core bulldozer module to a Core with HT on. I guess it is marketing semantics at the end of the day. Is it an overgrown quad or a castrated 8 core? Either way it seems like for most people you might as well get an i5-2500 as the Bulldozer “wins” are few and far between, although eventual street pricing might sway that.
Nice, I wonder if I still have my notes somewhere for comparison… currently my X6 is running 3.5 GHz at 1.25V for better power usage, as beyond that point it started needed more voltage. There it is, 1.35V only got me to 3.9 GHz. Excellent in its day although now a little overshadowed now by the sandy bridge CPUs.
An interesting comment given generally was the Bulldozer may be more optimised for server workloads hence the integer/threads optimisation. As far as a lot of crunching is concerned, it might be closer to consider the “8 core” as an extended 4 core kinda like Intel’s hyper-threading. I think for me, I’d have taken 2 floating point units per integer unit! But my thought is they might be trying to push that to GPU as they get more integrated. But the GPU is no FPU replacement still.
