April 5 2011 news by xbitlabs

Gigabyte Launches AM3+ "Black Socket" Motherboards

Gigabyte Technology, one of the largest makers of mainboards in the world, on Monday unveiled a lineup of mainboards with AM3+ socket designed for AMD FX-series microprocessors code-named Zambezi and powered by AMD's next-generation Bulldozer micro-architecture.

AMD Orochi design is the company's next-generation processor for high-end desktop (Zambezi) and server (Valencia) markets. The chip will feature eight processing engines, but since it is based on Bulldozer micro-architecture, those cores will be packed into four modules.

The Bulldozer processors, Radeon HD 6000 "Northern Islands" discrete graphics cards and AMD 900-series core-logic sets will power AMD's next-generation enthusiast-class platform code-named Scorpius.

4-2-2011 news by realworldtech

The upcoming server products in the Orochi family are based off the novel Bulldozer microarchitecture on a 32nm SOI process. As described in an earlier article, Bulldozer is a fairly radical departure from the conventional x86 world. Each module includes a pair of integer cores which share a front-end, floating point unit and a 2MB L2 cache.

The most striking thing about the results is the sheer variation. A Bulldozer core is anywhere from 0.6X to 1.3X the performance of Istanbul. In some ways, this is to be expected. Bulldozer's novel shared FPU has half the execution resources per core of Istanbul for traditional x86 code compiled without the new fused multiply-add (FMA) instructions.

With those caveats, we can proceed to examining the data, shown in Table 1. The first set of columns show the measured performance for the 1.8GHz, 32-core Interlagos system and the closest comparable. For most of the benchmarks, we used a 1.9GHz 24-core Magny-Cours system as a reference; but Himeno and pbzip2 (in italics) use a 1.9GHz 48-core system as a baseline.

4-1-2011 news by arstechnica

With so much riding on AMD's upcoming server architecture, codenamed Bulldozer, it's no surprise that the recent appearance of a set of benchmarks of a Bulldozer engineering sample is creating quite a stir. Interpreting these benchmarks is not easy, given their complete lack of critical context (i.e., compiler options, software versions, optimizations, etc.) and the unknown state of the sample chip that they were run on.

The clockspeed is an unnaturally low 1.8GHz, and the part's extremely poor memory performance suggests that the probe filter was disabled and that valuable bandwidth is being eaten up by cache coherence traffic.

Product tested and Benchmark link:

AMD Eng Sample ZS182045TGG43_2 is a processor. This product is available from AMD. The AMD Eng Sample ZS182045TGG43_2 has been tested via the Phoronix Test Suite in the configurations listed below.

AMD Bulldozer Benchmarks