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by makomk
3597 days ago
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With the current state of the tech press, that's probably a good idea as any difference from how Intel does things is spun as a negative. Take this paragraph for the Anandtech article, for example: "Unlike Bulldozer, where having a shared FP unit between two threads was an issue for floating point performance, Zen’s design is more akin to Intel’s in that each thread will appear as an independent core and there is not that resource limitation that BD had. With sufficient resources, SMT will allow the core instructions per clock to improve, however it will be interesting to see what workloads will benefit and which ones will not." Intel-style SMT actually has more contention for shared processor resources than Bulldozer did, not less, because far more is shared. Despite that, AMD's switch to it is being spun as a positive simply because it's closer to what Intel do. |
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The FP contention between the cores in a Bulldozer module makes all recent AMD chips perform objectively worse in most benchmarks than their peers from Intel.
Intel's architecture isn't a priori a goal to achieve. Intel's performance in real-world workloads is a good goal.
There are some heavily-threaded, integer-heavy workloads that Bulldozer and related parts are still incredibly competitive at, even compared to current-gen Intel parts. For the right workload, a Bulldozer-family processor can be a real screamer and they are priced incredibly aggressively. We should recognize, though, that the architecture is high performance only for these specific workloads.
Perhaps AMD should have pursued more innovative architectures. I am not saying that Intel's is perfect. But it is important to note that for current general purpose computing workloads, Intel's architecture is superior to Bulldozer.