AMD Downgrades Bulldozer Transistor Count By 800 Million 149
Robadob writes "It has come to light that AMD PR had originally reported that the new Bulldozer processor's transistor count was 2 billion. AMD PR are now asking reviewers to correct this count to 1.2 billion from the original amount they provided ~3 months ago."
They just lost my business! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm paying for *transistor count*, not GFLOPS!!!
Priorities, people!
Not helping their cause much.... (Score:5, Insightful)
So a few points about this rather bizarre announcement:
1. Unfortunately for AMD this does nothing to reduce the power consumption of Bulldozer which is higher than a 3960x at stock speeds. When you remember that over 1/3 of the transistors on the CPU (using the new 1.2 Billion transistor count) are in the L3 cache that only runs at 2.2 Ghz while the L3 on the 3960x runs at full-speed, you have to wonder at whether GloFo's 32 nm process has some fundamental flaws, or if AMD didn't listen to GloFo's design rules (or some of both).
2. AMD's and GloFo's combined marketing of their "gate-first" 32 nm process bragged loudly and repeatedly that gate-first (as opposed to gate-last used by Intel) gave 20%+ transistor density benefits and that Intel's process wasn't truly 32 nm. Well, when Bulldozer was reported to have a die area of 315 mm^2 and a 2 billion transistor count, this seemed like a justified advantage. Now, however, the transistor density of Bulldozer is lower than any other 32nm design from either AMD or Intel. Note: the same AMD PR guys that adjusted the transistor count confirmed that the 315 mm^2 die size is still accurate.
Rory Read is smart to shift the focus away from these unmanufacturable monsters and to put it on the next-generation of Bobcat and Trinity designs where AMD can actually leverage it's only real advantage over Intel: the GPU.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
The PR numbers provided for tech journalist previews and fan-wank benchmarks are pretty much just noise: If the number is big, you'll see a couple of sentences about "zOMG 2 Billion! motherfucker is a BEAST!". If the number is small, you'll see a couple of lines about how 'the foocorp design team was heavily focused on optimization for this generation'. The only thing the end customer will care about are the benchmarks at the end.
For people attempting to glean financially useful clues about a company's process strength or design prowess, or ability to hit some thermal target in the upcoming product cycle, transistor counts are likely much more relevant; but are also rather less likely to depend on PR numbers(actually reverse engineering a modern x86 chip would be Serious Business; but just paying somebody to crack the top off, get some die shots, and provide good ballpark numbers on transistor numbers and allocation between cache and various functional blocks should be relatively cheap compared to some of the moves you might make on the basis of such information...)
It seems bafflingly weird that PR would provide a number so grossly wrong, since the fanboys and the haters basically make no real use of the number and the people who really care should be able to easily detect a lie of that magnitude; but I'd be somewhat surprised if the original PR numbers meant all that much.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it means nearly nothing to anybody. The closest one I've seen is another answer to this thread linking it to cache sizes, but even then, people measure caches on bytes, not transistors.
Buyers want software performance, measured by benchmarks, cache size + instruction throughput, or any other functional metric. Engineers care more about hight level units, except where they optimize deeper, fabs care about die area. Nobody cares about how many times a poly line crosses over a crystaline line.
By the way, that is probably the reason such a huge mistake in the number could be made. Nobody cared.
Re:Serious policy changes here ? (Score:5, Insightful)
what about examples from outside the USA? BP stands for British Petroleum, don't you know?
some of the food scares going on in China are just scary - melamine in milk, cooking oil salvaged and re-refined from retail liquid waste... of course, people got the death penalty for the milk thing.
Re:Class action lawsuit please (Score:5, Insightful)
They told you the V10 engine used 50 hours of labour in its manufacture but it turned out the V10 engine only used 25 hours of labour in its manufacture.
It's still the same engine in every way. Transistor count is simply a manufacturing detail.
Re:LOL (Score:3, Insightful)
Whoosh!
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems bafflingly weird that PR would provide a number so grossly wrong, since the fanboys and the haters basically make no real use of the number and the people who really care should be able to easily detect a lie of that magnitude; but I'd be somewhat surprised if the original PR numbers meant all that much.
IANALE (I am not a layout engineer), but it's my understanding that it is not an easy task to actually figure out how many transistors are contained within a modern chip. The CAD tools used aren't anything like Photoshop, where you can pop up an info window and see how many pixels it has. There are many different pieces within a chip - some might be standard library cells (like building a chip out of legos, rather than making a custom injection mold and filling it with plastic - where each building block is a few to a few thousand transistors (or more?). Other parts might be a full-custom layout, where somebody hand-placed every transistor to get the highest speed, lowest power, smallest area, or some combination of all of those. The chip might also include some hard macros, IP that is purchased from another company (like a memory controller or power manager) and just plopped onto the chip, with no insight to what is actually inside. There are hierarchies, and some parts (like cores or cache sub-blocks) are replicated a couple times, or a couple thousand times.
So it's my indication that any time you hear one of these numbers, it's really just an estimate anyway. Probably some engineer at AMD heard the 2B number after PR trumpeted it, thought it sounded a little high, and found a mistake in somebody's estimate.
Or, maybe more likely, marketing just made crap up without actually asking any of the engineers. That happens a lot too, and it pisses us engineers off to no end. At least when they do it after the product is made, PR has to fess up. When they do it before a product is finalized, it usually means engineering has to scramble and actually make it do whatever marketing promised.
Re:Serious policy changes here ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Er, well, actually, BP doesn't stand for British Petroleum any more. It officially stands only for BP. In fact, they have tried to make people think BP stands for Beyond Petroleum. OK, this sounds like an academic point, but actually it illustrates the very practical point that all these corps from whatever country are international and indistinguishable nowadays.
Re:Serious policy changes here ? (Score:1, Insightful)
No, BP still stands for British Petroleum regardless of what their corporate HQ wants to call themselves.
And gambling is not equivalent to gaming.
And thermal is not equivalent to fossil fuel burning.
And KFC is really Kentucky fried chicken.
And marketing is really just plain old fashioned advertising.
etc. etc.
don't buy into the crap just because someone with an agenda and a bad reputation would like to change what you think.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)