AMD's Bulldozer server benchmarks are here, and they're a catastrophe

Re:AMD's Bulldozer server benchmarks are here, and they're a... by saulrh on Monday November 21, 2011 @11:30PM (#3264084)

  Again, one can't help but feel that a hypothetical 16-core
  Magny-Cours would have been a better option.

I think that this quote demonstrates exactly the reason that AMD went forward with their catastrophe - current architectures can't get much more parallel. AMD is betting (heavily) that Intel's architecture will max out in the near future while AMD keeps improving Bulldozer. Should be interesting.

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Re:AMD's Bulldozer server benchmarks are here, and they're a... by wmf on Tuesday November 22, 2011 @12:03AM (#3264164)

I don't see evidence of this. Intel has moved to a more scalable ring bus while AMD is still using a crossbar (although the Bulldozer module design should allow each pair of cores to share a crossbar port).

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Re:AMD's Bulldozer server benchmarks are here, and they're a... by zdw on Tuesday November 22, 2011 @12:27AM (#3264230)

The HyperTransport (HT) crossbar offered more options, although people didn't tend to use it like that. I can only think of a handful of examples (the Sun X4500/X4540 for example) that took full advantage of the expanded I/O functionality it offered, and there were even a few FPGA solutions that could have been used to create really innovative custom logic designs.

The problem was that, outside of totally custom solutions like the above, it didn't offer enough of a benefit to AMD, especially once Intel jumped on the memory directly attached to CPU bandwagon.

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