Home
Amd

Almost Time! Battlefield 3 Release, Is Your Hardware Ready?

Subject: Graphics Cards | October 24, 2011 - 03:06 PM |
Tagged: radeon, nvidia, geforce, bf3, amd

I know that you might have Battlefield 3 overload by now, but I wanted to make sure you all remembered to take a look at our BF3 Performance Guide from a couple weeks back to make sure your PC is ready for what might be the most anticipated and talked about PC titles in years. 

14.jpg

Here is a summary of the content we have written based on the game - make sure you know ALL of it so you can get your system prepared for the pending battle!!

Keep checking back at PC Perspective as we are planning on doing some more fun live streaming of our BF3 matches and be sure to sign up for the official PCPer "Fragging Frogs" platoon in Battlelog!

Source: PC Perspective

Podcast #175 - NVIDIA 3D Vision 2 Launch, Intel Earnings, News of the week and more!

Subject: Editorial | October 20, 2011 - 09:17 PM |
Tagged: podcast, nvidia, Intel, amd, 3dvision, 3d vision

PC Perspective Podcast #175 - 10/20/2011

Join us this week as we talk about the NVIDIA 3D Vision 2 Launch, Intel Earnings, News of the week and more!

You can subscribe to us through iTunes and you can still access it directly through the RSS page HERE.

The URL for the podcast is: http://pcper.com/podcast - Share with your friends!

  • iTunes - Subscribe to the podcast directly through the iTunes Store
  • RSS - Subscribe through your regular RSS reader
  • MP3 - Direct download link to the MP3 file

Hosts: Ryan Shrout, Josh Walrath, Jeremy Hellstrom, Allyn Malventano

This Podcast is brought to you by MSI Computer, and their all new Sandy Bridge Motherboards!

Program length: 1:15:39

Program Schedule:

  1. 0:00:40 Introduction
  2. 1-888-38-PCPER or podcast@pcper.com
  3. http://pcper.com/podcast
  4. http://twitter.com/ryanshrout and http://twitter.com/pcper
  5. 0:01:35 MSI Z68A-GD80 G3 LGA 1155 ATX Motherboard Review
  6. 0:07:02 3D Vision Gets Updated with LightBoost, Larger Panels and New Glasses
  7. 0:13:19 Corsair HX1050 Professional Series Power Supply Review
  8. 0:13:55 ASUS N55 Core i7 15.6-in Notebook Review: Can One Laptop Do It All?
  9. 0:15:44 Intel Reports Q3 2011 Earnings
  10. 0:26:15 This Podcast is brought to you by MSI Computer, and their all new Sandy Bridge Motherboards!
  11. 0:27:20 Overclocking the next generation of Intel CPUs
  12. 0:31:05 ASUS P8Z68 Deluxe GEN3 Board Spotted with PCI Express 3.0 Support
  13. 0:32:45 Salt + electrons = 6x increase ialn HDD platter density?
  14. 0:37:38 AMD May Release 28nm 7000 HD Series GPU In December
  15. 0:41:35 EVGA Demos X79 Classified Motherboard at GeForce LAN 6
  16. 0:44:30 Not quite older than dirt; the microprocessor turns 40
  17. 0:48:05 Benchmarking Bulldozer and taking the GPU out of the picture
  18. 0:52:02 SandForce finally patches elusive 2200 series SSD controller bug. OCZ issues firmware, others soon to follow.
  19. 0:58:00 Jon Peddie sees IGPs dying in the next year
  20. 1:01:50 Hardware / Software Pick of the Week
    1. Ryan: "Take Ownership" tool
    2. Jeremy: Beefing up your laptop’s gaming chops with an external GPU
    3. Josh: For Thief lovers out there:  http://www.thedarkmod.com/main/
    4. Allyn: Siri (fan boy)
  21. 1-888-38-PCPER or podcast@pcper.com
  22. http://pcper.com/podcast   
  23. http://twitter.com/ryanshrout and http://twitter.com/pcper
  24. Closing

Source:

Intel Reports Q3 2011 Earnings

Subject: Editorial | October 19, 2011 - 05:29 PM |
Tagged: sandy bridge, Q3 2011, Intel, earnings, bulldozer, atom, amd

This should come as a shock to no one.  Intel made a lot of money this past quarter.  We again have seen new records in both gross revenue and net income.  GAAP revenue for the quarter came in at an astounding $14.2 billion.  Essentially that is the net revenue for AMD during a three year span.  Net income is again impressive at $3.5 billion.  In AMD terms that would be gross revenue for three quarters.  Truly there is a tremendous disparity between the two companies who are very bitter rivals.  It is no wonder AMD is starting to really fall behind.

All of the internal groups, except for one, have shown tremendous growth over the past year.  Notebooks have really lead the charge as of late, but both desktop and server markets have shown very favorable growth for the company.  Even the McAfee and Intel Communications divisions provided upwards of $1 billion to the bottom line.  The only area that Intel is lagging in is the Atom line.

intel_logo.jpg

When we look at the product offerings of Intel in server, desktop, and notebook markets we see they have a sizeable advantage in both process technology and performance per watt.  Intel has been shipping 32 nm chips for well over a year and a half.  On the desktop this has translated to modestly priced processors that have a much smaller die size yet comparable (and even superior) performance to the AMD products which are much larger in size and more expensive to produce.  On the server side we really have not seen AMD make any inroads since Intel took over that market in a big way once they released the QPI based designs which took away AMD’s last architectural advantages; HyperTransport and integrated memory controllers.

Read the rest of the article after the break.

Source: Intel

The tragic comedy that is Bulldozer

Subject: General Tech | October 18, 2011 - 12:07 PM |
Tagged: bulldozer, amd

It is hard to know exactly what to say about Bulldozer.  It is not a complete fail for in multithreaded applications it sits in between the performance of the i5-2500 and i7-2600, which it was intended to.  Power consumption at idle has been improved but not at load which hurts, but not as much as the poor single threaded performance which is far worse than we had hoped.  SemiAccurate traced the long 5+ year history of the Bulldozer to see where AMD went astray from the dream that was.  The length of the story is certainly a part of it, 5 years is too long for silicon to languish especially when part of the delay was due to problems with the 45nm process.  Read on to hear about the struggles AMD underwent to get this chip to market as well as what corners were cut, or at least rounded, to get the chip on shelves.

SA_Bulldozer_Excavator1.jpg

"The story of Bulldozer and why it does what it does, both good and bad, can be summed up as death by 1000 cuts. There isn’t really any high point to the architecture, nor are there any really low points. To make matters worse, there isn’t any obvious smoking gun as to why things ended up so, well, meh. What you can get now, what you should have been able to get, and what you will be able to get from this new architecture is a long and complex story. Lets get started."

Here is some more Tech News from around the web:

Tech Talk

 

Source: SemiAccurate

AMD May Release 28nm 7000 HD Series GPU In December

Subject: Graphics Cards | October 15, 2011 - 12:34 PM |
Tagged: amd, gpu, graphics card, southern islands, HD 7000

Tom’s Hardware reports that a source within AMD has indicated that the company may release their upcoming Southern Islands GPU earlier than expected.  Previous rumors suggested that AMD would have their performance desktop graphics cards out in the first quarter of 2012 with the lower clocked and mobile processors coming out a bit sooner than that.

amd-logo1.jpg

If this new information turns out to be true, we may be seeing the high performance desktop graphics cards released in limited quantities of 7000 to 10,000 units in December with a full rollout of the company’s 28nm graphics card lineup in the months following.  Specifically, the first cards may be available as soon as December 6th, 2011.  It remains to be seen whether or not the lower power cards will still be released before the high performance desktop cards.

Personally, I'm interested to see how AMD's approach with their Southern Islands GPU will match up against Nvidia's current and future (more) general purpose computing design.  Are you excited for Southern Islands?

Source: Tom's Hardware

Podcast #174 - AMD FX Processor launch, New products from Corsair, Viewer Questions and more!

Subject: General Tech | October 14, 2011 - 12:02 AM |
Tagged: podcast, Intel, FX, corsair, bulldozer, amd

PC Perspective Podcast #174 - 10/13/2011

Join us this week as we talk about the AMD FX Processor launch, New products from Corsair, Viewer Questions and more!

You can subscribe to us through iTunes and you can still access it directly through the RSS page HERE.

The URL for the podcast is: http://pcper.com/podcast - Share with your friends!

  • iTunes - Subscribe to the podcast directly through the iTunes Store
  • RSS - Subscribe through your regular RSS reader
  • MP3 - Direct download link to the MP3 file

Hosts: Ryan Shrout, Josh Walrath, Jeremy Hellstrom, Allyn Malventano

This Podcast is brought to you by MSI Computer, and their all new Sandy Bridge Motherboards!

Program length: 57:42

Program Schedule:

  1. 0:00:40 Introduction
  2. 1-888-38-PCPER or podcast@pcper.com
  3. http://pcper.com/podcast
  4. http://twitter.com/ryanshrout and http://twitter.com/pcper
  5. 0:02:04 AMD FX-8150 Processor Review - Can Bulldozer Unearth an AMD Victory?
    1. Bulldozer Impressions: That was... interesting
  6.  0:29:19 Video Perspective: AVADirect $1000 Gaming System Review
  7.  0:30:00 This Podcast is brought to you by MSI Computer, and their all new Sandy Bridge Motherboards!
  8. 0:31:15 Corsair Releases High Capacity Force GT and Force 3 SSDs
  9. 0:33:00 Corsair Launches New H40 and H70 CORE Sealed Loop Water Coolers
  10. 0:35:23 Corsair Announces Availability of $139 Gaming PC Case
  11. 0:37:55 Samsung and Micron Developing Hybrid Memory Cube Technology
  12. 0:41:35 A quick and easy way to duplicate your drives
  13. 0:45:32 Email from Jeff about SSD slow down
  14. Email from Kent about SSD reviews
  15. 0:50:00 Hardware / Software Pick of the Week
    1. Ryan: Novatel Mifi Verizon 4G LTE
    2. Jeremy: MDK2HD!
    3. Josh: Sup Com and SC: FA on Steam now!  Cheeeap.  http://store.steampowered.com/sub/11732/
    4. Allyn: Sysinternals tools (namely Process Explorer)
  16. 1-888-38-PCPER or podcast@pcper.com
  17. http://pcper.com/podcast   
  18. http://twitter.com/ryanshrout and http://twitter.com/pcper
  19. Closing

Video coming soon!

Source:

Can't hide the Bulldozer

Subject: General Tech | October 12, 2011 - 05:52 PM |
Tagged: bulldozer, amd, fx series, fx-8150

Not to imply that looking at more Bulldozer reviews is like rubbernecking as you pass an accident ... but there are some similarities.  While it might not be as great a performer as we were hoping, the chance to finally see AMD's new architecture is still a great thing.  A totally new way of looking at a CPU Core, a brand new style of overclocking and a processor that seems almost ahead of its time when you examine its multitasking capabilities is interesting even if it does not deliver the processing power that we hoped for.  Check out The Tech Report's indepth report to see what they thought of its performance. 

TR_bulldozer-overlay.jpg

"AMD's "Bulldozer" processors are here, and we have a full and extensive review."

Here are some more Processor articles from around the web:

Processors

 

Source: The Tech Report

Bulldozer Impressions: That was... interesting

Subject: Editorial | October 12, 2011 - 08:45 AM |
Tagged: GLOBALFOUNDRIES, fx-8150, bulldozer, am3+, amd, 32 nm

Huh. 

I am pretty sure I am not the only person who has read these Bulldozer reviews (including Ryan's here at PC Perspective) and had that particular reaction.  Bulldozer was supposed to bulldoze the competition.  It turns out it barely outpaces its own predecessor, the Phenom II X6 1100T.  In fact, in terms of IPC, the older Thuban architecture gives it a sound thrashing when both are clocked at 3.3 GHz.  So why should I be impressed with this processor?

mb3.jpg

I guess the answer is… you shouldn’t.  At least not yet.  I distinctly remember back in November of 2007 being invited to Lake Tahoe to test and report about the first Phenom samples that were available for limited testing.  We were not allowed to take the samples home with their new AM2+ based motherboards.  When going over the results of the tests with Ryan (I was not part of PCPer at the time) we quickly saw that the 2.6 GHz Phenom was unable to keep up with the Core 2 Q6600 from Intel.  This was a little surprising, as we expected the original Phenom to clean house due to its very forward looking architecture (HT, IMC, beefier FP/SIMD units, etc.).  The original Phenom had its fair share of problems, to say the least.  TDPs were very high, there was the revision B2 bug that was solved in B3, and due to the 65 nm process it did not nearly have as much cache as was needed to make it a more efficient product.

Click to read the rest of this post.

Source: AMD

The early bird gets the Bulldozer

Subject: Processors | October 12, 2011 - 12:44 AM |
Tagged: fx-8150, FX, cpu, bulldozer, amd, 990fx

You've been waiting through years of rumour and innuendo but the day has finally arrive, AMD's brand new Bulldozer architecture is here.  It is like nothing we've seen before in any chip based off of the venerable Athlon line, which has served dutifully for over a decade.  Bulldozer takes AMD's vision of a dual core processor not as two cores sewn together, but more as Siamese twins which share vital resources and are so closely conjoined that you cannot truly say where one ends and the other begins.  The Bulldozer core is exactly that, while only four Bulldozer cores exist they can handle eight integer execution units, and four shared 2 x 128 bit floating point/SIMD which is interpreted by your OS as 8 cores.

Implementing a new technology is not without its drawbacks.  The Athlon/Phenom architecture has been perfected by AMD thanks to its long life, while the Bulldozer is brand new and they've already started polishing it into Piledriver which will we see in the not too distant future (especially compared to the wait for Bulldozer).  That immaturity is shown in Ryan's review where he compares it clock for clock to a Phenom II.  It gets worse when compared against SandyBridge as the Bulldozer can at most occaisonally equal the performance of an i7-2600K.  The only saving grace is price when you look at heavily multi-threaded applications and there are not many out there. 

 However one benchmark cannot tell the whole story, which is why [H]ard|OCP released two reviews on Bulldozer which focus on different aspects of the chips performance.  Start off with their look at the performance which will give you an idea of how the chip performs under normal circumstances with its power saving features enabled and overclocked with those features disabled.  Then they head onto what most people are interested in, the gaming benchmarks.  Theoretical and productivity software benchmarks are one thing but we've all got to have fun sometimes and for those moments the new FX chips don't look too bad at all ... unless you are a Civ V fan.  

dieshot.jpg

"Computer hardware enthusiasts have literally waited for years for AMD's Bulldozer architecture to come to market and we finally see this today in its desktop form, code named Zambezi, brand named AMD FX. In this article we share with you our analysis of Bulldozer's performance in synthetic benchmarks and desktop applications."

Here are some more Processor articles from around the web:

Processors

 

Source: [H]ard|OCP

AMD FX-8150 Processor Review - Can Bulldozer Unearth an AMD Victory?

Author:
Date: October 11, 2011
Subject: Processors
Manufacturer: AMD
Tagged: fx-8150, FX, cpu, bulldozer, amd, 990fx

Bulldozer Architecture

Introduction

Bulldozer.  Since its initial unveiling and placement on the roadmap many have called the Bulldozer architecture the savior of AMD, the processor that would finally turn the tide back against Intel and its dominance in the performance desktop market.  After quite literally YEARS of waiting we have finally gotten our hands on the Bulldozer processors, now called the AMD FX series of CPUs, and can report on our performance and benchmarking of the platform.

With all of the leaks surrounding the FX processor launch you might be surprised by quite a bit of our findings - both on the positive and the negative side of things.  With all of the news in the past weeks about Bulldozer, now we can finally give you the REAL information.

Before we dive right into the performance part of our story I think it is important to revisit the Bulldozer architecture and describe what makes it different than the Phenom II architecutre as well as Intel's Sandy Bridge design.  Josh wrote up a great look at the architecture earlier in the year with information that is still 100% pertinent and we recount much of that writing here.  If you are comfortable with the architeture design points, then feel free to skip ahead to the sections you are more interested in - but I recommend highly you give the data below a look first. 

The below text was taken from Bulldozer at ISSCC 2011 - The Future of AMD Processors.

Bulldozer Architecture Revisited

Bulldozer brings very little from the previous generation of CPUs, except perhaps the experience of the engineers working on these designs.  Since the original Athlon, the basic floor plan of the CPU architecture AMD has used is relatively unchanged.  Certainly there were significant changes throughout the years to keep up in performance, but the 10,000 foot view of the actual decode, integer, and floating point units were very similar throughout the years.  TLB’s increasing in size, more instructions in flight, etc. were all tweaked and improved upon.  Aspects such as larger L2 caches, integrated memory controllers, and the addition of a shared L3 cache have all brought improvements to the architecture.  But the overall data flow is very similar to that of the original Athlon introduced 14 years ago.

As covered in our previous article about Bulldozer, it is a modular design which will come in several flavors depending on the market it is addressing.  The basic building block of the Bulldozer core is a 213 million transistor unit which features 2 MB of L2 cache.  This block contains the fetch and decode unit, two integer execution units, a shared 2 x 128 bit floating point/SIMD unit, L1 data and instruction caches, and a large shared L2 unit.  All of this is manufactured on GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ 32nm, 11 metal layer SOI process.  This entire unit, plus 2 MB of L2 cache, is contained in approximately 30.9 mm squared of die space.

arch00.jpg

Continue reading our review of the AMD FX Processor (codenamed Bulldozer)!!


PC Perspective
Upcoming Events
  • 6/20 @ 6:00pm PDT / 9:00pm EDT
    This Week in Computer Hardware
  • 6/26 @ 7:00pm PDT / 10:00pm EDT
    PC Perspective Podcast