The price of Core i7 2600K is not a constant. It has been steadily decreasing since it was first launched and Core i7 2700K when launched will be priced at the original price of Core i7 2600K at release a few months ago, not at the current price of Core i7 2600K hence what I mean by higher price. The quality of the processor can also drop at the end of the lifetime of the product as they shift their attention, equipment and resources for the newer product.

There are many ways to counter yield issues and one of them is setting the standard factory voltage a bit higher. That is why Llano has such high voltages to increase the probability of having a 'good' chip but in actual fact its voltages can be much lower than the original. High stock speeds doesn't matter when you can have processors at a standard voltage that they have come to accept. The method of quality control is never the same and it may be totally different 6 months from now.

VR-Zone trolled me. They should have released their statement a day earlier or else my statement would be true. Now it is only partially true.

It would be nice if the cherry picked ones have reasonable voltages at 4.5GHz for a 24/7 OC. That way can increase the ceiling by another 200MHz to 4.7GHz maybe.

It is normal for companies to cherry pick their comparisons to make themselves look better. Nobody wants a chart that shows that your product is inferior to the competition. It is a fallacy to even consider that BD having a much higher default clock would result in it having higher performance than SB. There are many other variables in play that will affect its performance as both of them are not identical in any way as they are made by 2 different person with differing methods. If your statement is true then I can assume that a 1.5L Toyota will have equal performance, top speed and mileage as a 1.5L Proton regardless of price.

It would be a lot better to actually wait for the user reviews to come out to actually decide whether BD does deliver as promised. I'm not saying that BD will annihilate or dominate SB but the numbers will show what is BD strong points and weak points.

When you're the underdog in the industry and you're against a competition that is dominating you have no choice but to be in the average field. AMD is only able to creep up slowly while gaining market share and not be an instant success overnight. Also to consider that AMD is much smaller than Intel therefore R&D budget is also constrained which will definitely affect the duration of making a product and how well a product will be made as there are less manpower to deal with the work. Nobody is forcing you to get AMD, if you have the money for a top range then get Intel. You have the money, you have the freedom of choice then buy what you want.

everling has made a good point but I will make a brief statement.

If I give you RM50 to make me a sandwich, it would almost definitely taste good wouldn't it. Now I give you RM10 and I want you to give me the same quality and taste equivalent to the RM50 sandwich made earlier. Can you do it within the stated budget and get the same quality?

You're looking at Steve Jobs who before the 90s was pioneering in the things they make. Apple has not changed since the first day till now. Also Steve Jobs is legendary and a one in a million CEO therefore not possible to think that AMD will have similar luck. Rory Reed apparently has done a good job with Lenovo so I would like to see whether he could do the same with AMD.

Apple is also in the business of selling devices, not semiconductor parts therefore they wouldn't have to rely on their current technology like AMD and Intel does. If Apple wants to sell a product, just rebrand it like the A4 and A5 chips.

Dirk Meyer is not as good as you think. He had no foresight for the mobile space which is where most consumers would spend their money on now. Another would be Rick Bergman who recently left which I think is more likely fired. No matter how good he has been with AMD in the past, clearly he is not making the situation any better at the present moment.

Why not post picture of all the CPU packaging? Have you tested it yourself already?

You can't use an AM3+ processor with an AM3 motherboard but you can use an AM3 processor with an AM3+ motherboard. All AM3+ sockets are identifiable with its distinct black socket instead of the white that AMD has used in the past.

If the pre release benches are true and BD is in fact underwhelming compared to its previous generation then you could probably still get a Phenom II X4 or Phenom II X6 and still have similar or better performance than BD. The PII X6's still does have better multithreaded performance even compared to the Core i5 2500K but pale in comparison in single threaded workloads. It is quite cheap these days to get an X6. If you're not keen on rebuilding it to an Intel based then I do suggest that you upgrade to a PII X4 or PII X6 now or at least till stocks last because it will be phased out very soon.

The official reviews should be out within 24 hours and we'll see if BD is worth it's hype.

Depending on what you want to use your PC for. If your main purpose is gaming then definitely a SB would be a better choice as games aren't that multithreaded yet. BF3 'might' be BD's strong point if BF3 performance does skew towards AMD processors.

Why should there be a price drop by Intel when their current lineup has yet to be affected by BD? Unless there is a major drop in Intel's sales there will not be a price drop and an unnecessary price drop means that Intel is earning 10% less which is not what they want. What is more likely to happen is to release a refresh like the Core i7 2700K.

Non-official benches FX-8120 @ 4.0GHz





Same person and similar stuff to what lex posted a while ago but this is the same test done with the FX-8120 at 4.0GHz.

If I were Intel, releasing a newer product that is 100MHz higher and about RM100 more than the previous is a way better strategy. They stand to gain nothing by reducing their prices as AMD is never a threat to begin with. Like I said before even if BD is a unbelievably good CPU that excels in ST and MT tasks and totally blows i7 out of the water, AMD cannot keep up with the demand like Intel could. GloFlo is a small fab and can't pump out the volume or yield like Intel's fabs could.

Although it is very possible to oppose the competition to submission, there are antitrust laws that protects and prevents monopoly. There is really no upside to AMD being brought down. If AMD does go down one day, we could probably see at least some price increase on Intel products just because everybody needs a PC these days and you can't do much even if the price increased.

Intel's monopoly is not like the monopoly you could find like a local shop or small to medium business would because even if a shop reduces its price to kill its neighboring competitor and monopoly a certain area, there will definitely be someone to replace the one that has fallen. When AMD goes down, there is no one to take its place as a x86 competitor. Even if the x86 license is transferred to another company there is no guarantee that the new company will be releasing new products for another decade.

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This post has been edited by dma0991: Oct 12 2011, 12:17 PM

4 months ago...

Flagship product review will be first. Lower end ones will come weeks later or when it is available to the reviewers.

That is why it is late gets its own post.

AMD is already small as it is right now. If they get any smaller than they are now they will not be able to sustain themselves and a buyout will happen. AMD is currently very fragile and if Intel does get aggressive in their pricing, AMD will cease to exist in a couple of months. Their market cap is dropping and getting way lower than expected, it does not take a lot for a company like AMD to disappear. There is no need to start a price war when your competition is not fighting back. Look at Intel, they do not reduce the price of some of their products unless it does not sell as well as they expected.

Nobody knows why AMD decided to do as such during design stages but a deep pipeline, low IPC and high clockspeed is akin to P4. Supposedly BD is a forward thinking design with instruction sets not available on old architectures, has not been fully used yet but it has not worked on their favor obviously. Now we all know for sure why Dirk Meyer and Rick Bergman was fired.

Anyways here's something to lighten the mood.

They almost always overstate performance figures, both AMD and Intel. IB will definitely be better than SB but it should be no more than 10% at most. The main focus of IB is lowering power consumption to compete with mobile sector and more improvement is being made to IB's IGP. Absolute performance have to wait till Haswell comes out.

I was expecting this video to come out.

I think AMD can still turn out to be great someday if they get their priorities right and management in order. Not necessarily R&D is the only problem that is causing AMD's downfall but also the management seems lacking. At first the BOD fired Dirk Meyer publicly about not having a mobile strategy and most probably about BD as well. Then Rick Bergman fired as well by Rory Reed for not being progressive enough which I think is what escalated the problem even further. Had AMD not created comics, taunting gifts and some publicly leaked slides, I don't think it would be that bad of a shock to many.

I do really hope that Rory Reed can really turn AMD to gold like he did with Lenovo because it really needs a proper management and better management of R&D funds to somehow make a better product. It is kind of sad to see that AMD is doing a disservice to themselves by releasing a product that is underwhelmed by its previous. I don't think it would be that bad if it did looked better than Phenom II X6 at the very least. Anand has sum it up pretty well and we're already partially affected by monopoly and it is just going to get worse if AMD doesn't get any better.

I applaud those who still would be considering buying BD. At least some monetary support is being to keep AMD afloat while they get their stuff together although I might add that major improvement may not come by refining the BD architecture. If it makes those who are buying or planning to buy BD feel better, then BF3 might give some motivation although this is a GPU limited test.

The unboxing of the FX-8150 if anyone is still interested in knowing what is inside the box. Looks like it is a special edition with a lot junk freebies that you pay.

Even when Windows 8 comes, not much improvement can be seen in MT tasks but might improve ST performance slightly. The current Windows 7 does not recognize BD architecture that well so if a program wants a thread/core, it will go in the order of Core 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7. This is not what the AMD engineers wanted because if a thread were to use Core 0 & 1 for example, it will share the front end resources and create a bottleneck. What AMD engineers wanted with Windows 8 it that will schedule threads better so it will use in the order of Core 0,2,4,6,1,3,5,7 so there will be no sharing of front end resources and improve ST performance slightly. There might not be any MT performance increase from this newer thread scheduling because all 8 cores are used unless Windows 8 somehow makes use of the new instruction sets that come with BD.

They should advertise, get 8 cores in your system with Windows 8! Chinese will love the string of lucky numbers.

That kind of affinity only exists with Intel processors with HT. I know what you mean by affinity on even cores when in Windows Task Manager you could see an interlacing of the even numbered cores being used but HT is only active when that program is using more than 4 threads. For BD it doesn't work as well because the second core in the module is an exact and similar to the first so a whole module will be used in a 2 threaded situation instead because Windows looks at it like a normal thread unlike HT. The front end for BD is only as wide as single Phenom core and when shared, it causes 1/2 as wide for a BD core which is a bottleneck.