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  • Ethaniel - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    ... and that's pretty much it. Fusion looks great but we need it in the market pronto (dropping prices as part of the process), and Bulldozer is, well... not there. Meanwhile, Sandy Bridge is laying waste to every single benchmark it touches. Clock's ticking...
  • medi01 - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    Well, and what if you don't want to pay 200$ for CPU plus 130-150$ for new motherbord (brilliant marketing move by Intel, nobody bothers to note how much new CPU => new motherboard concept costs) what gives?

    Sandy Bridge is a nice line of CPUs, but pricing, demanding new mobo makes it "oh well" if you are a typical gamer. Investing those hundreds of bucks into GPU is likely to give much greater performance improvements.
  • ellarpc - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    Medi01 lot's of us are sitting around with cash in hand waiting to upgrade. I've been hobbling my x4 955 around since it came out waiting for the BD bomb. Bulldozer was supposed to be out before 2010. Then they promised to send out samples before the end of 2010. It's 2011and they can't even show a tiny sample of it at CES. That looks bad for the chip being out this year. I don't think I can wait a whole other year for the bulldozer. The i7-2600k looks pretty tasty from where I'm standing. Too bad AMD doesn't see that they may lose potential upgraders if the y wait too long.
  • vol7ron - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    agreed
  • azguy90 - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link

    Double agreed! I am going to be building a new computer when I get home from Afghanistan, and right now I am planning on a 2600k build, because BD is nowhere in sight.
  • medi01 - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    I don't get the point of "upgrade for the sake of upgrade" especially considering you already have moder 4 core CPU. What do you do on your PC that would justify giving out hundreds of bucks for the upgrade?
  • ellarpc - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    I have a computer and like be able to give my customers the best advice on the latest hardware. Anandtech helps me out a ton on the items I've never used or sold (i7-980x as an example) but using hardware myself is a big bonus. My wife kids and I are all gamers so as I upgrade my computer I trickle down my hardware to my wife and kids computers so they essentially get upgrades as well. It's a win win for all of us. I have been holding off for longer than usual waiting for word on Bulldozer but it doesn't look like it will happen any time soon.
  • ellarpc - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    "computer shop"
  • nofumble62 - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    Anyone upgrade their system will have to buy new motherboard nowaday. No difference whether AMD or Intel.
  • semo - Saturday, January 8, 2011 - link

    Atleast with AMD you get more features if not the highest speed (more PCIe lanes, more SATA 3 ports and an actual "budget" range too).
  • Christobevii3 - Monday, January 10, 2011 - link

    I've run an asus 790fx am2+ with sb600 for 3 years now. I can still update the bios and run a 6 core phenom now. It started witha 5000+ x2. To be able to still upgrade an intel this day you'd have to had waited for the x58 to be out which is nearing 2 years but dies pretty much now.

    Core 2's you had two busses unless you waited for the p35 or bought the expensive x48 board and again at most you probably got 2 years out of them.

    I'll wait for bulldozer to see instead of intels sandy bridge serving up $170 mobos that only have 8x/8x pci-e configs.
  • azguy90 - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link

    Bulldozer isn't any better for upgrading. Bulldozer CPUs are going to require an AM3+ motherboard; so your upgrade path is about the same as Sandy Bridge. You will be able to put older chips in the new boards, but not new chips in old boards.
  • nuudles - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    Bulldozer should have been released now, AMD showed how much it hurts if you are late to the party by getting a 6 month head start in dx11 and therefore completely dominating dx11 marketshare. Unfortunately it is much harder keeping up with Intel than Nvidia...

    Hopefully Llano is a homerun for them as the mobile space is more lucrative than desktops. Unfortunately they are even further behind with their mobile cpus thankfullythan the desktop ones. Hopefully power gating will show big battery life gains and the GPU will be strong enough to make anything other than top end discrete mobile cards obsolete (to make up for worse cpu perf between athlon ii + tweaks and sandy bridge).

    Another beef is they should have had something to compete with optimus by now, they must have had 6 months to build support into the 6000 series! Either that or get their cards to draw rediculously low amounts at idle through power gating all but 1 alu or something like that (if that is possible).
  • medi01 - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    It wasn't that nVidia was 6 month late, but that on top of being 6 month late, they created power hungry monsters with so-so performance.

    If Buldosers do perform well, delay won't matter much. If they don't, ouch, AMD (unlike nVidia who can simply punch editors harder, for better reviews, comparing stock clocked GPUs to cherry picked overclocked, cough) can't really afford that.
  • shtldr - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    "Another beef is they should have had something to compete with optimus by now"

    I've had it for like half a year. It's called switchable graphics.

    Acer 3820TG, switchable between HD 5650 and i5 integrated graphics.
  • nuudles - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    yes it is switchable, but not dynamic like optimus
  • YukaKun - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    Asus K40AB line bro. 2009 and still kicking besides Optimus.

    AMD just fails hard at marketing and positioning their products sometimes =/

    Cheers!
  • nuudles - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    Luckily for AMD we are at a point where even a low to midrange cpu is fast enough for most applications, very few consumers would notice a performance difference between something like an Athlon ii x4 and an i5 2400 in most of their programs.

    Even in games the difference is not huge, so if they strike the right performance with the integrated GPU and let the GPU and CPU work well alongside each other (openCL on the gpu for big performance gains in highly parallel workloads) they might just have a winner.

    I would much rather get athlon ii x4 or phenom ii x4 cpu performance levels together with hd5670/5750 gpu performance levels than i7 980 with hd 5450/5570.
  • sirmo - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    """Right now, GlobalFoundries is entering full production mode for 32nm, with AMD’s Llano chips scheduled to be the first market solution to use the process. Later this year, AMD will also launch their Bulldozer cores on the 32nm process."""

    Everything we've seen so far said Bulldozer was going to be first 32nm product in Q2 and Llano was going to be later? Why the sudden change?
  • JarredWalton - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    Maybe in the past Bulldozer was coming first, but everything I've heard for the past few months was: Brazos first, Llano seconds, Bulldozer third. Probably the use of K10.5 with HD 5600 to make Llano on 32nm was easier than a completely new architecture. What really worries me is that there were some hidden undertones in conversations that make me think desktop Bulldozer may not even get out in force until 2012. I really hope I'm imagining things and they get the chips out more like Q3'11.
  • Edgar_Wibeau - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    The original plan at the begnning of 2010 was:
    - Llano first
    - Ontario second
    - Bulldozer third

    Then, further problems emerged with Llano, yiel problems according to AMD, some suspect problems with the GPU-part having yield-problems in 32nm SOI/HKMG which is a completely new process tech for a GPU.

    So on the analyst CC in november (even befor that IIRC) the current (inofficial) plan was communicated:
    - Ontario first
    - Bulldozer starting from april
    - Llano in Q3

    Some sources now claim a re-push forward to june for Llano, but that's very uncertain as of now.

    There are more mistakes in the article, like Ontario is claimed to be manufactured on a 32nm process, which (ULP Bulk CMOS) doesn't even exist neither at TSMC, nor at GloFo. Bothe were cancelled in favour of 28nm.

    Maybe Anand should hire an AMD spinner for a change.
    http://www.techeye.net/chips/top-intel-spinner-tip...
  • Edgar_Wibeau - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    http://www.planet3dnow.de/photoplog/index.php?n=12...
  • Edgar_Wibeau - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    http://www.planet3dnow.de/photoplog/index.php?n=12...

    Inofficial of course, could be fakes of course.
  • spigzone - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    Charlie said in an article a couple weeks ago on Semiaccurate GloFo's latest Llano respin suddenly came up roses, apparently everything fell into place and they suddenly had a production ready yield. May have resulted in Llano being bumped up ahead of bulldozer.
  • JarredWalton - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    Okay, so after meeting with AMD yet again today I asked for clarification. Sorry for the misinformation above, but Bulldozer and Llano are both supposed to come out Q2 apparently. I was told they should launch within ~1 month of each other.
  • sirmo - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    Those are good news. Thanks for the clarification.
  • GeorgeH - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    "First it was getting below 1 micron, but we’ve long since smashed that barrier and are moving steadily towards the 1nm mark. How small can we go?"

    Well, the radius of a single atom is ~0.1nm (depending on how you define radius.) I'd say that's a pretty solid floor on feature size. :)
  • HibyPrime1 - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    Then they need to get working on making individual electrons into transistors.
  • marraco - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    No. Miniaturization is dead end.

    After 1nm we are into picometer scale, on which quantum forces completely changes the rules.

    The answer are polinary transistors, which tap picometer capabilities by working with many atoms in coordination, instead to just reducing the number of atoms on the same transistor.

    We need to use the same atoms on different transistors, and simultaneously. That way we would increase [logical] transistor density witouth [non-existent] smaller atoms, or stacking layers in 3D.
  • marraco - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    Here is the first polinary transistor:

    http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-10-triple-mode-tr...

    It is capable of switch between 3 states instead of the 2 states traditional transistors.

    Once we achieve the four states transistor, it will be able to do the work of 2 transistors on the space of one, efectively duplicating density. It is the future of Moore's law, but it requires deeper understanding of quantum forces.
  • tipoo - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    Now that is a rather amazing concept. Quantum physics is always good for a mindf***, lol.
  • marraco - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    (For the record: strictly speaking any transistor is a quantum device)
  • vol7ron - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    I think all this talk is reinforcing the amount of research done in creating a working/useful quantum computer:

    http://www.dailytech.com/Researchers+Create+Seven+...

    http://www.dailytech.com/Researchers+Claim+First+R...
  • medi01 - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    Doesn't atom size depend on the material? ;)
  • Stuka87 - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    Well, the mass certainly depends on the material, but mass does not necessarily equate to size.
  • techworm - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    you are not right about desktop bulldozer .according to the last amd roadmap 8 core zambezi cpu will ship in early q2 probably april and not 2012! as you said
  • Abwx - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    Hey, buy a SB instead, why waiting for a processor due next year?....
    It s somewhat what is underlying in this repôrt...
  • Shadowmaster625 - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    Uh because SB costs $400+ for an overclockable cpu and motherboard. Duh. I love it when people say just spend more money on a cpu/motherboard than you were planning on spending on an entire pc! This is especially true in the notebook space. "Just buy a ULV SB and it will pwn brazos and last 8 hours." Well yeah, and the damn chip will cost more than the entire netbook. Duh.
  • silverblue - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    Didn't someone once say that AMD was skipping 32nm entirely to focus on producing at 28nm? Looks like they've changed their mind; perhaps 32nm is proving better than they expected (so they've likely got some refined Bulldozer silicon already).
  • Abwx - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    32nm is the next step, and contrary to Anandtech dodgy informations,
    Bulldozer is scheduled for end april/ early may...

    http://forum.hardware.fr/hfr/Hardware/Processeur/u...
  • DanNeely - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    It was TSMC that is skipping 32nm.
  • silverblue - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    Here's one such article that made us believe otherwise...

    http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/display/2010040...
  • mino - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    32nm bulk is NOT the same as 32nm SOI.

    The former was scrapped (in favor of 28nm) while the latter is in production as we speak.
  • silverblue - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    Thank you for the clarification.
  • Guspaz - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    A 100% improvement in standby battery life does not mean "100% less standby power", because that would mean it's using no power at all. They're saying battery life is doubled, which means that power is reduced by 50%.
  • krumme - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    Worlds fastest mobile GPU on page 4, under GF headline, and blended with tons of Optimus talk.
    Why do AMD care to communicate with Anandtech at all?
  • vol7ron - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    what? where?
  • mino - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    Umm, better question is: Why did AMD (again!) mess up their communication with a major IT site?

    I mean, it is not (primarily) AnandTech's job to make sure they get the proper info from AMD ...
  • Lolimaster - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    We all know anand (person and site) work with intel's dollars but please at least do a decent article. Even an amputated monkey can do something better.
  • mino - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    Sorry to spoil your party, but aside from a poor writing quality (which is OK in a news article), this article is anything but biased.

    (Form a guy regularly bashing AT for bias.)
  • Lolimaster - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    And with less bias of course.

    Anandtech Your source for hardware biased analysis and news.

    http://scientiasblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/anandtec...
  • bennyg - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    I don't care about four + years ago. I look around now and get a lot more info from AT's reviews and analysis than I do from 95% of other reviews which are just regurgitated press release, rehashed marketing lines, a couple of dodgy graphs and a graphic that takes up half a page with a "Gold Award" or "Editors Choice" or some such rubbish.

    I think you're misinterpreting criticism of crap for "bias".

    If you don't like the product, you can always ask for your money back. Oh wait...
  • mino - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    1) a quality spin is the most dangerous because you do not recognize it ... (it is the same as with good lies)
    2) AT has, as a matter of fact, tendency to get spiny here and there, (but i do not believe it is paid for it)
    3) This specific article is just a news summary of CES. Accusing it of spin is stupid because its primary purpose is REPORTING about (what companies are) spinning at CES!
  • bennyg - Saturday, January 8, 2011 - link

    yeah, I forgot too, Intel's marketing dollars mustn't be enough to stop AT bagging the crap out of Atom every time it's mentioned.

    ---

    I also think Intel - especially it seems with SB - are far ahead of AMD's CPUs as well - jeez, I'm biased - where the hell are my Intel Dollars?!
  • srp49ers - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    It seems like you are purposely misleading the readers by saying that bulldozer is coming later this year. When AMD themselves said Q2 at analyst day.
  • Abwx - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    Such innaccuracies are so big that it s not by chance....
  • silverblue - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    It's entirely possible that AMD have purposefully gone quiet on the entire subject for fear of promising something that may yet be delayed yet further. Bulldozer not only caters for the enthusiast segment of the market, but pretty much their entire server roadmap... so it would be good for us to be told sooner rather than later if it's going to be delayed or indeed come in early Spring.

    The server market is their bread and butter, so it's really in their best interests to let their potential customers know the score rather than risk letting them all move over to Nehalem and Sandy Bridge based Xeon servers.
  • tipoo - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    Err, Q2 IS later this year, is it not?
  • JarredWalton - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    I have to admit that the complete and utter lack of Bulldozer stuff at CES is rather shocking to me. Dual-core Sandy Bridge isn't going to be immediately available for purchase, but such laptops were everywhere. More to the point, we're seeing a lot of stuff that won't come out officially until Q3'11, so that's why I'm wondering where Bulldozer/Orochi/Zambezi are. If they're launching at the start of next quarter, why not a single sample system at the AMD meeting room?

    Now, to give you the other side of the story, AMD is about at the "quiet time" of the year right before they report earnings. I'm not sure of all the specifics, but basically companies aren't supposed to talk about much at all in such situations, and perhaps that's why Bulldozer isn't at CES. As I mentioned above, AMD did inform me that Llano and Bulldozer would come out within ~1 month of each other, and I believe they were suggesting ~May for Llano which would mean ~June for Bulldozer.

    Anyway, those of you who haven't ever tried to cover a trade show like this can't imagine the difficulty of keeping everything straight. There were several inaccuracies in the initial text, which I have now corrected. however, I got about two hours of sleep Tuesday night before running around all Wednesday. That was followed by ~5 hours of sleep, then more running around like crazy (from ~8:30AM to 6:30PM that night). At the end of all the meetings, you then get to try and put together an article discussing everything you saw that might have been interesting, and lack of sleep certainly comes into play. I thought it would take about an hour to finish up this article when I started at 7PM. It ended up posting at around 12:30AM. It's not that the article took a lot of time to write, but when your brain is fried after a couple hard days it's difficult to focus and get things done--for me at least.

    I've got some other updates regarding AMD to post, but overall I'm quite pleased with what they're releasing right now and I figured most people would accuse me of being too positive. Apparently not.
  • techworm - Saturday, January 8, 2011 - link

    i don't undrstand why you are insisting to put bulldozer later than what is scheduled to be;i mean it has been clarified by AMD that bulldozer will launch prior to Llano which puts it exactly in late april timeframe as was mentioned by some comments
  • Abwx - Saturday, January 8, 2011 - link

    Looks like you re arguing with an Intel employee,
    though AMD are quite messy with their PR job.
    Anyway, BD is sheduled for somewhere in april
    with Llano following in Q3 according to the few
    available official and leaked infos.
  • JarredWalton - Sunday, January 9, 2011 - link

    Enough with the "Intel employee" garbage, please. I spent upwards of three hours in meetings with AMD at CES; I didn't even visit with Intel.

    As mentioned, AMD is entering their "quiet time" before the yearly earnings report, so they are not allowed to discuss products that aren't shipping in any sort of detail. The fact is, I asked about a dozen times in varying ways for more information on Llano and Bulldozer, and they cannot (legally) provide me with the details I'd like. Too bad for us. Most of the leaks you're referring to are now outdated, so other than AMD telling me "within a month of each other" (and they didn't tell me which would come first), we really don't know what's going on right now.

    Which will come out first: Llano or Bulldozer? It really doesn't matter that much. Both will release close to each other, and personally I think Llano would be the better chip to ship first. Imagine what Llano reviews will be if BD ships first (and lives up to the hype): "Well, Llano has some pretty sweet integrated graphics, but we can only wonder what it would have been like when paired with Bulldozer."

    The two products are also very different markets, and for some people Llano is the more exciting offering. Imagine HD 5650 performance from an IGP! If AMD can get the updated K10.5 power requirements down to Core i3/i5/i7 levels, that's enough to win a lot of important benchmarks. My biggest concern with Llano is that K10.5 in the past has been okay performance with pretty terrible battery life relative to Intel--we're talking Core 2 levels of performance but at the cost of higher power in many situations.

    If Llano has a lot of new power gating enhancements thrown in (relative to Athlon/Turion/Phenom II), that would really change it's potential. Sandy Bridge quad-core got 10.24W of average power draw during our Internet battery life benchmark with a 17.3" LCD. To put that in perspective, the AMD Phenom II P920 used roughly 15.3W of power in the same test, with a 15.6" LCD (and a paltry 1.6GHz maximum clock). So yeah, we'll see what happens probably in the next six months.
  • silverblue - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    Troll alert.

    Sorry, someone had to say it. May as well be me.
  • mino - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    "Brazos is even smaller than Atom, in part thanks to the use of 32nm (Brazos) vs. 45nm (Atom)"

    While 40nm TSMC process has even better density than Intel's 32nm process. The naming stands.
  • JarredWalton - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    Fixed. Sorry for the confusion; it's been a couple long days.
  • Yuriman - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link

    "Providing 25-33% more performance using 30% less power (and 100% less standby power)..."

    100% increase in standby battery life != 100% less standby power.
  • iAdmin~r - Saturday, January 8, 2011 - link

    Llano is a failed bulldozer.
  • silverblue - Sunday, January 9, 2011 - link

    It's nothing of the sort. It's not even targeted at the same market as Bulldozer.

    Troll alert #2.
  • papapapapapapapababy - Saturday, January 8, 2011 - link

    i dont get brazos. lame cpu paired with lame dx11gpu. how exciting. at least with intel you got a GREAT cpu paried with the lame-st- gpu. simply put, the integrated gpu of amd needs to be GREAT . at least > 5770 levels of performance for me to even care. so yea, triple core brazos > no nerfed dual core + integrated no nerfed gpu.
  • The Crying Man - Sunday, January 9, 2011 - link

    If you don't "get" Brazos then I suggest you go back and read all the articles that mention Ontario and Zacate, and concentrate on what their targeted market is.
  • Dr.Kamiya - Sunday, January 9, 2011 - link

    That's a sweet penholder!
  • Shaorinor - Sunday, January 9, 2011 - link

    As much as AMD would most likely love to get BD out there, just releasing it for the sake of releasing it would probably do more harm than good if it's not actually done.

    All this talk about losing market share, I'm sure AMD realizes this. If something isn't done, then it isn't done. It sucks, but what can you do? Fix it as fast as you can and hope to get it out as soon as you can.

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