AMD Bulldozer Products Roll Out

摘要

The first Bulldozer products are now shipping,including FX processors for PCs and Opteron processors for servers. With these products, AMD plans to target PC enthusiasts and gamers, high-performance computing, cloud computing, and power-efficient servers. But Bulldozer is simply unable to meet all of these demands. The initial benchmarks reflect this limitation, showing good results in some areas and not so good results in others. Bulldozer was optimized for parallelizable server workloads, and that is where the products shine. For dualsocket server configurations, Opteron offers better performance than competing processors from Intel. With up to 16 cores, Opteron should offer leading performance for multithreaded applications, and it will also be attractive for high-performance computing applications. In the past, AMD has led in low pricing, and with the newest high-end Opteron products, it has further reduced prices to attract customers by offering the best performance per dollar. Benchmark results for the FX processor, however, are not very positive. Tradeoffs such as sharing processor elements helped AMD increase the number of cores, but they hinder implementation of a powerful SIMD floating-point unit for the best gaming experience. Although AMD enables overclocking and has set a low product price, a future revi sion addressing performance issues may be required if the chip is to receive greater market acceptance.