

Manufacturing bombshell:  AMD cancels 28nm APUs, starts from scratch at TSMC - DigiHound
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/106217-manufacturing-bombshell-amd-cancels-28nm-apus-starts-from-scratch-at-tsmc

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Symmetry
Yup, Semiaccurate reported on this story a week ago. Its probably a good move,
given that the slips in GF's 28nm process mean that the two products would
only have been produced for 6 months or so.

[http://semiaccurate.com/2011/11/15/exclusive-amd-kills-
wichi...](http://semiaccurate.com/2011/11/15/exclusive-amd-kills-wichita-and-
krishna/)

~~~
DigiHound
SemiAccurate got the story wrong and blames the issue on GF pushing back their
SHP process. They don't mention the move to TSMC and they claim there will be
a follow-up in months.

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feralchimp
In case anyone else read that article and wondered "what's all this gate-last
vs. gate-first business?"

<http://www.eejournal.com/archives/articles/20111114-gate/>

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CamperBob
I'm not even sure what an "APU" is, frankly. Lots of undefined buzzwords in
that article.

~~~
r00fus
<http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/apu/Pages/apu.aspx>

tl;dr - AMD's new GPU+CPU combined chipset... the logical extension of their
purchase of ATI.

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nas
The following little piece of news is also interesting. Brad Burgess (chief
architect of Bobcat) is now at Samsung (<http://www.linkedin.com/pub/brad-
burgess/26/aa9/93>).

From what little I've read about AMD's recent processors, the low power line
is kicking butt (Bobcat, etc) while the high end (Bulldozer) is not.

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manuscreationis
So...

Are these Bulldozers really as bad as I keep reading about?

A friend of mine who is very knowledgeable when it comes to hardware insists
that the issues are being overblown, and that if you get the correct
configuration of hardware (ram/mobo/etc) along with the right overclocking
setup, these procs are just as good, as well as more future-proof. He says
most benchmarking tests are more single-threaded examples of load, which the
Bulldozer obviously performs worse with, despite this being a more realistic
representation of the kind of load you'd find in your average desktop,
especially when it comes to gaming.

Thoughts?

~~~
eropple
As you note, for desktop/gaming purposes it's pretty obvious that single- or
few-threaded performance is still king, and I see no reason to expect that to
change in the foreseeable future. And Bulldozer is really, really, really bad
at it. "But you can overclock it!" is a silly argument; you can get an i7 up
to 5GHz or something equally unnecessary and it'll blow away whatever you can
get that Bulldozer silicon up to. The bigger problem is in the hardware
design, which is intensely over-shared and results in hardware-level blocking
conditions, as evidenced by the various reviews out there...and overclocking
doesn't help that.

I'd consider Magny-Cours for some types of server workloads, though I'd
probably go with Sandy Bridge (and definitely would for a desktop). I wouldn't
buy Bulldozer for anything.

~~~
manuscreationis
Thats a shame...

I'm looking into a new rig, and he's completely sold on the design. I can
imagine a world in, lets say, 2013-2014 where the desktop becomes a more
multithreaded environment, but that just isn't where were at today, and thats
just my guess. He's convinced the overclocking aspect makes all the
difference, and Intels don't OC as well, but thats not what i'm reading (nor
what you're saying).

I do like the conceptual architectural changes made with the bulldozer, but
current, and forthcoming, software just doesn't seem like it will make use of
it. It definitely seems like more of a server-minded approach to an
architecture.

~~~
eropple
I think you're being optimistic. We're going to see all our desktop
applications become pervasively multi-threaded in two years?

And Bulldozer is going to be better at this than Sandy Bridge, which is good
at both single- and multi-threaded loads?

Ehhh. Not likely. The design isn't even that good or interesting; as I
mentioned before, it's overly reliant on shared components that aren't
conducive to the sort of magical perf improvements that "but you can
overclock!" would require.

------
comex
Extremetech's mobile interface is still unusable.

~~~
wiredfool
Yep, I couldn't read the first column on my ipad, it's half cut off on first
view, scroll over and the other half is cut off.

Wonder if privoxy could do that in for me.

