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Comments
Disappointing but not surprising.
Can someone give an executive summary on that please?
I think it's too early to rule out the Bulldozer in our industry. The main losses for Bulldozer are at the single thread level; but under multi-threading it was quite good.
Everything in our industry is multi-threaded and most are 64 bit optimized ... both areas which Bulldozer does very well in.
The Bulldozer looks like it sucks in gaming and legacy apps but excels in multi-thread and modern applications.
I suspect Apache/mySQL/Virtualization benchmarks will show the value in AMD's "more cores" approach.
The Bulldozers displayed a high affinity for slow single thread but high multicore performance which is perfect in our VPS/hosting world.
In most of the multi-thread benchmarks; the Bulldozer kept up with the flagship i7 2600k at 80% of the cost. Especially in 64bit apps, the Bulldozer looked really nice.
The i5 2600k is better if you want to game on the machine. But if you want to run VPS servers or run Apache/Nginx/mySQL, BD seems like it will most likely show up at the i7 2600K performance level at a 20% lower cost
If the Server (16 core Interlagos) chips can produce similar results as the desktop chip has indicated (strong mult-thread) and stay 80% cheaper; they will be a very competent alternative to Xeons at only 60% of of the Xeon price in a dual CPU setup.
If you can get 90% performance or more of a dual Xeon 56xx setup at 60% of the price, that is quite a good deal.
I'm not seeing it, and I have been 100% AMD for the past 5 years until the E3's came about.
The problem is not going to be the cost of the BD chips, but motherboards for them. Or lack of server grade boards for them. Only tyan makes an AM3 board, and only accepts UDIMM, so same 16gb limit is in play for the FX BD CPU. The Opteron 6200's I don't see at less then $750. The E5's are due just as soon and I'm fairly unimpressed with those as well from a cost/marketing value point. For me to get excited about BD the 6200's would need to be $200-300, and that is just not going to be the case while the 6128 is still priced at $250 and 6168 at $750. Following that logic, the 6200's should come out of the gate right around $1k, and for the price I can buy 3 E3-1270's.
I think I can still earn more money while providing a like service with the E3 for now. Something will come out eventually to change that, but BD and the E5's are not it.
The E3's are really nice chips (basically a re-badge of the i7 2600k with ECC support). Bulldozer also supports ECC and I'm guessing their RAM limits will be similar as I've only seen 4 RAM slots on either of them. The $90 difference between the CPU's is not earth-shattering buying outright for colocation. However Datacenters may have more significant pricing between FX-8150 and the E3's for monthly leases. If you can save $20-$30 per node each month on 50 nodes, that's a chunk of cash.
But the E3's are limited to a single CPU just like the FX-8150.
I think Bulldozer's sweet spot may be in Dedicated Server rental and the 2 CPU market where it looks like it will match or exceed the Xeon x5600's in server performance.
And we are still waiting on the mid-range line "Valencia" chips (1/2 CPU, max 16 RAM slots). They may be more aggressively priced than the AMD 6200's.
The news on Bulldozer looks flat on the desktop but pretty good for heavy load servers.