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[Corky]

I know i know
But for e-peen more than anything

God bless that e-peen of ours.

I think i will skip Bulldozer for a Watercooling setup and get it in 2012 or something and games better have octo-core support by then.

This however sounds like a great idea, I have 0 knowledge about watercooling systems but if they are "futureproof" in the sense that you can use the same setup for sockets and cpus released ~2years after the purchase, then that would be mighty sweet

 

[Kyaw]

Yeah the cpu waterblock is pretty much future proof unless cpu sockets magically become smaller. GPU is also universal fit, so it can fit all gpu cores. VRam bits are cooled by heatsinks.
All other parts are pretty much futureproof as well.
Main reason i wanted watercooling is because of my 480 dumping a ton of heat. Also i wanted to overclock it. :3

 

[Unknown Soldier]

People need to do their research a little more. What AMD calls a "core" in Bulldozer isn't what most people traditionally think of a core as, which is an integer unit, an FPU, and the associated circuitry to feed and power those units. 8 cores of Bulldozer does not compare directly with 4 cores of Core i7 or even 6 cores of Phenom II.

In unrelated news, in case you people haven't figured it out by now, if AMD really had a CPU which was going to blow the doors off of Intel's offerings, they would be screaming to the high heavens about their benchmark results. The fact that AMD is showing exactly no real-world performance data should give you an idea of how confident they are about this possibility. I'm not particularly optimistic and you shouldn't be either.

My Core i7-950 (Bloomfield) OCed to 4.01ghz isn't exactly quaking in it's boots, to say nothing of those guys in the "I need a new PC 2011" thread who are blasting 4.8ghz Sandy Bridge boxes.

 

[JaseC]

People need to do their research a little more. What AMD calls a "core" in Bulldozer isn't what most people traditionally think of a core as, which is an integer unit, an FPU, and the associated circuitry to feed and power those units. 8 cores of Bulldozer does not compare directly with 4 cores of Core i7 or even 6 cores of Phenom II.

In unrelated news, in case you people haven't figured it out by now, if AMD really had a CPU which was going to blow the doors off of Intel's offerings, they would be screaming to the high heavens about their benchmark results. The fact that AMD is showing exactly no real-world performance data should give you an idea of how confident they are about this possibility. I'm not particularly optimistic and you shouldn't be either.

If Bulldozer is another swing and a miss at the enthusiast market, I think I'll give up on the idea of AMD reclaiming the performance crown. Intel have been ahead for, what, 5 years now?

 

[Shambles]

People need to do their research a little more. What AMD calls a "core" in Bulldozer isn't what most people traditionally think of a core as, which is an integer unit, an FPU, and the associated circuitry to feed and power those units. 8 cores of Bulldozer does not compare directly with 4 cores of Core i7 or even 6 cores of Phenom II.

In unrelated news, in case you people haven't figured it out by now, if AMD really had a CPU which was going to blow the doors off of Intel's offerings, they would be screaming to the high heavens about their benchmark results. The fact that AMD is showing exactly no real-world performance data should give you an idea of how confident they are about this possibility. I'm not particularly optimistic and you shouldn't be either.

My Core i7-950 (Bloomfield) OCed to 4.01ghz isn't exactly quaking in it's boots, to say nothing of those guys in the "I need a new PC 2011" thread who are blasting 4.8ghz Sandy Bridge boxes.

So using this logic since there was very little benchmarks leading up to Sandy Bridges release the chips actually performed poorly and everyone now who thinks they are great are all part of the same delusion.

Companies don't release anything until the product is close to out the door. Whether info gets leaked out by third parties or not has nothing to do with AMDs/Intels marketing departments.

 

[·feist·]

Bulldozer 20 Questions, Part 1
http://blogs.amd.com/work/2010/08/23/”bulldozer”-20-questions-round-one/

Bulldozer 20 Questions, Part 2
http://blogs.amd.com/work/2010/08/30/bulldozer-20-questions-–-part-2/

Bulldozer 20 Questions, Part 3
http://blogs.amd.com/work/2010/09/13/bulldozer-20-questions-part-3/

Bulldozer 20 Questions, Part 4
http://blogs.amd.com/work/2010/10/04/20-questions-part-4/

Bulldozer Processor Topology Explained - with Elsie Wahlig
http://videos.amddevmedia.com/bulldozer/BulldozerFinalwebstream.mp4

AMDUnprocessed's YouTube Channel
http://www.youtube.com/user/AMDUnprocessed

What is an APU?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BihrG7DhhBM

AMD Cores: "Bulldozer" and "Bobcat" (Fusion)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIs1CxuUrpc

AMD "Bulldozer" Interactive Series - Introduction
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mr7kr4kimeM

AMD Bulldozer & Other Upcoming Technologies Interview With Jim Bovenzi (NCIX Tech Tips #85)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxbG2AmdMNY

 

[·feist·]

Intel Core i7 2600 vs AMD A8-3510MX Fusion

2011 AMD Mainstream Notebook Platform Compute Capacity Competitive Demonstration

AMD Fusion (Llano) demo (leaked) - Video 3 Llano vs Sandy Bridge Compute Capacity
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YfRh1FBkI4

 

[Vic]

WTF is wrong with the right graph?

edit: saw the video. nvm.

 

[darkwing]

Return of the King

 

[Shubit]

"We" is too inclusive. 'I' want Intel to keep releasing the Extreme Edition $1000 monsters, gouging be damned.

In fact, I am pissed that there is a long wait for the Sandy Bridge EE 8-core monsters while Joe Sixpack can frolic with the 2600K Sandy Bridge weenies.

Yeah well recently revealed roadmaps indicate that initial s2011 CPUs are going to be up to 6 cores only so there's even more waiting in your immediate future if you are truly set on an Intel eight core. There are going to be fully unlocked K editions too separated from the EE by the amount of L3 cache (12MB vs 15MB).

I on the other hand am never buying a CPU for my home computer that doesn't feature an ondie GPU again. The near future benefits of hybrid modes like switching between IGP and discrete GPU depending on application needs or running the desktop on a separate display via IGP while gaming on a bigscreen TV using a discrete card are appealing enough to me...

...an even bigger selling point though is the eventual opencl implementation (and it's use in games) for highly parallelized floating point calc heavy tasks like physics processing, per triangle collision detection and so on, freeing both the CPU and discrete GPU resources for better suited tasks. I think it's one of the reasons AMD designed the buldozer module to have dual integer cores while sharing FPU resources (other than server tasks being more dependent on the former); offloading FP calcs to transistor logic that's specificaly suited for them would bring an insane IPC increase in games... if only the software made use of it.

 

[Wazzim]

Return of the King

lol. We'll see, it'll be hard to beat Intel in gaming performance.

 

[From The Dust]

I'm not sure if I should upgrade my 925 yet. Maybe if I can get more performance out of 3D modeling, then I will bite

 

[1-D_FTW]

So using this logic since there was very little benchmarks leading up to Sandy Bridges release the chips actually performed poorly and everyone now who thinks they are great are all part of the same delusion.

Intel already was the market leader by a huge margin in gaming. What were people going to assume? It was going to be worse than their previous line?

Back when Intel was sucking ass and they finally pulled things around with the Core2 line, they had benchmarks released months before the product was available. They were shouting from every rooftop available that they were back. I agree with the above poster. No real-world gaming benchmarks is not a good sign. AMD has been behind for years. If they suddenly caught up (or passed) to Intel, the numbers would be out there.

 

[LiquidMetal14]

Looking like another set of good CPU's for the right price. As was mentioned, I'd like to see real world gaming performance before saying this is up there with the SB CPU's. Not that Intel doesn't have their own updates coming to that line too so any sort of "victory" may be short lived.

Tell me I'm not reading that chart wrong when it says they can be a minimum of $400? And that is the low end right?

 

[Anony]

awww man, amd is still using pin connections on their cpus, it's 2011

i just want to know the performance of their cpu in the same price range of the i5 2500k so i can finally upgrade

how long till the benchmarks are out

 

[JaseC]

Looking like another set of good CPU's for the right price. As was mentioned, I'd like to see real world gaming performance before saying this is up there with the SB CPU's. Not that Intel doesn't have their own updates coming to that line too so any sort of "victory" may be short lived.

Tell me I'm not reading that chart wrong when it says they can be a minimum of $400? And that is the low end right?

"System price" isn't the same as "unit price", I would imagine. There's no way they'd try to take on Intel's 2500k/2600k with a $700/+ CPU.

 

[M3d10n]

What I was saying more is that I don't really think applications will make that much better use of 8 threads over just 4 treads. What I want is each tread in the 4 core CPU to run as well as the treads in the 8 core counterpart, for applications that can only make use of 1 or 2 treads.

MT Framework games scale almost linearly with the amount of cores. Metro 2038 and GTAIV also seem to get faster with more cores. Seems CryEngine 3 can also scale to up to 8 cores.

UE3 games... not so much, however.

 

[Gritesh]

Looks like my Phenom X6 is going to be put to the wayside.

I for one, welcome our new octo overlords

 

[mt1200]

The AM3+ CPUs work with AM3 socket, dont they?.

I dont want to upgrade my mobo yet.

 

[mAcOdIn]

I on the other hand am never buying a CPU for my home computer that doesn't feature an ondie GPU again. The near future benefits of hybrid modes like switching between IGP and discrete GPU depending on application needs or running the desktop on a separate display via IGP while gaming on a bigscreen TV using a discrete card are appealing enough to me...

Hold up! I'm an AMD fanboy, I want what you say to be true but really, AMD hasn't given me a lot of reasons to have much faith in them. What you describe is a huge selling point for me, it's the sole reason I haven't upgraded this original Phenom 9500 with DDR2 because I want just what you describe, but like I said, they've given me very little hope that they're going to pull through with what you say. I have no doubt that the APU will be good enough for Windows, none, I also have no doubt that there will be some kind of crossfire solution at some point, what I do doubt is that the hybrid crossfire or whatever they'll call it at that time will be of any use. With the current IGPs on their motherboards with dedicated ram, albeit paltry, they've always been shit solutions and now all of a sudden I'm supposed to believe that I'll be able to pair their APU with a 4870, 5870 or 6870 level card in Crossfire? I'm not buying it. Look at AMD's supported Hybrid Crossfire chart: http://game.amd.com/us-en/content/images/crossfirex/CF_combo_chart.jpg
We're supposed to pair a 790G with a 3470? It's clear that AMD's never truly treated it like how the rest of us want it treated, for 4 years hybrid crossfire has been a stagnant super-budget solution afterthought limited to the 3470, 3450 and 2400 series cards, this is all but worthless for what we want. Worthless. And I've never seen them do a PowerXpress implementation on the desktop. I'm going to wait and see exactly what can be paired with these chips I just wouldn't get my hopes up because I'm actually expecting the compatible cards to be shit and anyone who games is still going to have to resort to not making use of the feature because it's just too poorly implemented.

...an even bigger selling point though is the eventual opencl implementation (and it's use in games) for highly parallelized floating point calc heavy tasks like physics processing, per triangle collision detection and so on, freeing both the CPU and discrete GPU resources for better suited tasks. I think it's one of the reasons AMD designed the buldozer module to have dual integer cores while sharing FPU resources (other than server tasks being more dependent on the former); offloading FP calcs to transistor logic that's specificaly suited for them would bring an insane IPC increase in games... if only the software made use of it.

And this here is going to be a huge wait and see. I hope it pans out but even now there's just a handful of OpenCL enabled apps but this kind of change is slow, could be by the time this point is of any consequence AMD will have moved on to their next generation of chips.

But still I wait because I want to be proven wrong but I say, don't get your hopes up.

 

[PjotrStroganov]

lol. We'll see, it'll be hard to beat Intel in gaming performance.

Luckily the cpu usually isn't the limiting factor and buyers can be more cost conscious when deciding which to buy.

 

[udivision]

Geeze, just from looking at the chip I can tell it's at least a 16 Meg pipe.

 

[rogue74]

I'm a bit confused.

When I built my new computer last summer, I went with AMD for 2 main reasons: price and upgrade path.

The AMD chip was much cheaper than Intel, and while slower, I decided I would put more of my limited budget towards the GPU since that is the limiting factor in most games. Plus, at the time the plan was that future AMD chips would use the existing AM3 socket whereas the future Intel Sandy Bridge chips would require a new motherboard.

Shortly after I built the computer, it was reported that future AMD chips would also require a new motherboard. I felt a bit disheartened at the news at the time since knowing that beforehand might have altered my buying choices.

Looking at this thread, it appears as if I WILL be able to use the new chips on my current MSI motherboard once they release a BIOS update. So should I claim victory or will the new processors be gimped on the old AM3 socket?

 

[mAcOdIn]

I'm a bit confused.

When I built my new computer last summer, I went with AMD for 2 main reasons: price and upgrade path.

The AMD chip was much cheaper than Intel, and while slower, I decided I would put more of my limited budget towards the GPU since that is the limiting factor in most games. Plus, at the time the plan was that future AMD chips would use the existing AM3 socket whereas the future Intel Sandy Bridge chips would require a new motherboard.

Shortly after I built the computer, it was reported that future AMD chips would also require a new motherboard. I felt a bit disheartened at the news at the time since knowing that beforehand might have altered my buying choices.

Looking at this thread, it appears as if I WILL be able to use the new chips on my current MSI motherboard once they release a BIOS update. So should I claim victory or will the new processors be gimped on the old AM3 socket?

Well, whether or not your specific motherboard will actually receive a bios update is one thing but the other is, yes, it will be gimped to some degree. One rumor is that the 9series chipset launching with Bulldozer will support a new, for AMD, powergating tech so your current motherboard can never hope to do that and who knows what other little things like hypertransport speeds and stuff like that that will also be slower on your current mobo.

Although, I'd say whoever told you that Bulldozer would for sure work in AM3 boards before even Sandy Bridge came out jumped the gun a little, we had no idea what was happening then and even now we still know so little so that advice was kinda poor in my opinion.

 

[mkenyon]

Day 1 Octo-Core for me. Woooo!

 

[JackEtc]

Just built a 1090t machine in January, I'm gonna have to pass.

Don't wanna have to buy a new mobo either (current board).

 

[The Bookerman]

This thread's way too confusing. How powerful are those chips and how much will they cost?

Will bulldozer give me more bang for the buck than a sandybridge Intel CPU?

That's all I care.

 

[mAcOdIn]

This thread's way too confusing. How powerful are those chips and how much will they cost?

Will bulldozer give me more bang for the buck than a sandybridge Intel CPU?

That's all I care.

Who knows? None of that stuff's been released yet.

It was a pretty good OP for what little real info there really is.

 

[Sanjay]

This thread's way too confusing. How powerful are those chips and how much will they cost?

Will bulldozer give me more bang for the buck than a sandybridge Intel CPU?

That's all I care.

Yeah, right now its just PR shit news getting released, waiting for real life performance data.

 

[GameplayWhore]

Looking at this thread, it appears as if I WILL be able to use the new chips on my current MSI motherboard once they release a BIOS update. So should I claim victory or will the new processors be gimped on the old AM3 socket?

Although, I'd say whoever told you that Bulldozer would for sure work in AM3 boards before even Sandy Bridge came out jumped the gun a little, we had no idea what was happening then and even now we still know so little so that advice was kinda poor in my opinion.

From the looks of it, the pins on the Bulldozer chips are physically larger than the holes in the AM3 motherboard. Wouldn't that make it impossible for them to fit?

 

[nib95]

AMD, you have my attention.

 

[Technosteve]

Eight Cores? why?

 

[LQX]

Eight Cores? why?

Better performance in doing multiple things?

 

[mAcOdIn]

From the looks of it, the pins on the Bulldozer chips are physically larger than the holes in the AM3 motherboard. Wouldn't that make it impossible for them to fit?

From what I last read some of the more modern AM3 boards can actually take bulldozer chips provided they can handle the voltage and get a BIOS update, none of them will take Llano.

Personally it's Llano and Trinity I'm waiting on, Llano's just an updated K10(current gen) with graphics but Trinity is an updated Bulldozer with graphics, but honestly I'm hoping Llano can at least slightly exceed my current first-gen Phenom and hybrid crossfire with something better than a 3470, don't want to wait for Trinity.

 

[maniac-kun]

Will build an octocore system for Skyrim and Battlefield 3

 

[Mudkips]

From the looks of it, the pins on the Bulldozer chips are physically larger than the holes in the AM3 motherboard. Wouldn't that make it impossible for them to fit?

It's likely that only certain AM3 boards will handle an AM3+ CPU, and the pin hole size serves as a simple lockout to prevent people from blindly shoving an AM3+ CPU into an AM3 socket.

Though it remains to be seen if the actual pins are as wide as the new (wider) holes.
You may end up with Llano CPUs (APUs, the ones with the built in GPU) having wider pins because they absolutely require tighter voltages, while Bulldozer CPUs will fit in fine and just require a BIOS update.

No one knows yet.

 

[mkenyon]

Eight Cores? why?

I run two virtual machines almost always. Being able to dedicate cores to them while still having enough for gaming will be glorious. As of right now, I have to shut down my two virtual machines when I play games with my quad core to get decent performance.

 

[From The Dust]

Would a hexacore be good for modeling? My mobo is pretty shitty and I need whatever excuse I can use to justify an upgrade

 

[Zombie James]

I run two virtual machines almost always. Being able to dedicate cores to them while still having enough for gaming will be glorious. As of right now, I have to shut down my two virtual machines when I play games with my quad core to get decent performance.

Speaking of VMs, anyone know what kind of hardware virtualization features Bulldozer will have?

 

[Dennis]

This thread's way too confusing. How powerful are those chips and how much will they cost?

Will bulldozer give me more bang for the buck than a sandybridge Intel CPU?

That's all I care.

This thread is for tech enthusiasts. Its not a buying guide.

Not that there is anything wrong with the questions you asked but the thread isn't just about those things.

 

[Dennis]

Eight Cores? why?

Game answer: future proofing

Non-game answer: there are already a lot of professional software that can use all the cores you can throw at them.

Bonus answer: run more programs simultaneously.

 

[PhatSaqs]

I hate this shit lol. So should I hold off on my I5 2500 box purchase and wait or what?

 

[Unknown Soldier]

I hate this shit lol. So should I hold off on my I5 2500 box purchase and wait or what?

I wouldn't wait. Sandy Bridge is here now and it's by far the best performing gaming CPU ever made. There's nothing that more than 4 cores will do for games today or anytime soon.

Besides, and I'm going to spell it out for you people since you've all bought AMD's marketing bullshit, Bulldozer doesn't have 8 actual real cores. What Bulldozer implements is an unbalanced design which pairs 2 integer execution units with 1 floating-point unit. Games are very FPU-compute intensive, and for the purposes of games (and other applications which are FPU-heavy like Photoshop and video encoders), Bulldozer is really a quad-core CPU. Your Microsoft Office and Firefox are integer-compute intensive but who the fuck needs 8 cores for fucking Firefox?

 

[aeolist]

None of the new CPUs are going to be bottlenecking any games in the near future. Sandy Bridge will likely be better at most workloads but it won't matter to a lot of people on this forum.

I just want concrete details about extra features like benchmarks for the Hybrid Crossfire APUs and how good they'll be for HTPCs.

 

[Shubit]

Hold up! I'm an AMD fanboy, I want what you say to be true but really, AMD hasn't given me a lot of reasons to have much faith in them. What you describe is a huge selling point for me, it's the sole reason I haven't upgraded this original Phenom 9500 with DDR2 because I want just what you describe, but like I said, they've given me very little hope that they're going to pull through with what you say. I have no doubt that the APU will be good enough for Windows, none, I also have no doubt that there will be some kind of crossfire solution at some point, what I do doubt is that the hybrid crossfire or whatever they'll call it at that time will be of any use. With the current IGPs on their motherboards with dedicated ram, albeit paltry, they've always been shit solutions and now all of a sudden I'm supposed to believe that I'll be able to pair their APU with a 4870, 5870 or 6870 level card in Crossfire? I'm not buying it. Look at AMD's supported Hybrid Crossfire chart: http://game.amd.com/us-en/content/images/crossfirex/CF_combo_chart.jpg
We're supposed to pair a 790G with a 3470? It's clear that AMD's never truly treated it like how the rest of us want it treated, for 4 years hybrid crossfire has been a stagnant super-budget solution afterthought limited to the 3470, 3450 and 2400 series cards, this is all but worthless for what we want. Worthless. And I've never seen them do a PowerXpress implementation on the desktop. I'm going to wait and see exactly what can be paired with these chips I just wouldn't get my hopes up because I'm actually expecting the compatible cards to be shit and anyone who games is still going to have to resort to not making use of the feature because it's just too poorly implemented.

Sorry I wrote hybrid but meant on-fly switching between graphics hardware for power efficiency. Both Nvidia and ATi tried to implement these capabilities on desktop before but got redlighted by Microsoft. This time Intel is leading the charge via their protege LucidLogiX' software based solution for s1155 CPUs. Nvidia recently followed suite by announcing their own solution and I'm sure AMD has got something similar ready for Llano.

And this here is going to be a huge wait and see. I hope it pans out but even now there's just a handful of OpenCL enabled apps but this kind of change is slow, could be by the time this point is of any consequence AMD will have moved on to their next generation of chips.

But still I wait because I want to be proven wrong but I say, don't get your hopes up.

There's game software with PhysX support right? True it's implementation has been half arsed (driven more by money hatting than genuine interest) but there is little gain for game devs to introduce proper game changing elements exploitable by a single vendor. Also the general consensus among the PC gaming crowd is you need separate hardware to not interfere with graphics processing therefore an overwhelming majority would simply rather not see these features implemented (how many even run SLI?). Now that we've got both Intel and AMD mainstream solutions featuring similar co-processing elements as inseparable part of the package and a common language to exploit them, hopefully there is a gradual shift towards these sorts of computing solutions. The benefit for the end user would be enormous.

I expect (more like wish for) at least a few major titles to make use of accelerated processing by the time Trinity hits. High end middleware solutions like CryEngine would be an ideal promoter especially since these guys are known for trying to squeeze every ounce of performance from every available resource. Of course some greasing by Intel and/or AMD certainly wouldn't hurt.

I hate this shit lol. So should I hold off on my I5 2500 box purchase and wait or what?

Go for it. Get a Z68 based motherboard if you are interested in fully exploiting your CPU's capabilities like:
-optional IGP output
-overclockable cores and IGP
-use of IGP for processing things other than graphics
-option of switching between graphics hardware

 

[mAcOdIn]

Sorry I wrote hybrid but meant on-fly switching between graphics hardware for power efficiency. Both Nvidia and ATi tried to implement these capabilities on desktop before but got redlighted by Microsoft. This time Intel is leading the charge via their protege LucidLogiX' software based solution for s1155 CPUs. Nvidia recently followed suite by announcing their own solution and I'm sure AMD has got something similar ready for Llano.

I thought that's what you were really wanting, it's what I really want, but I only gave a single sentence to AMD's PowerXpress. I just did some more reading up on it and it seems to have really progressed on the mobile front since the last time I looked at it, it seems like just what I want, I pray it's built into Llano and the 9series motherboards.

Lucid's an interesting company but I'm ultimately wary of throwing yet another manufactuer's drivers into the mix on my home system but they do seem to be moving fast, they responded pretty quickly with the Sandy Bridge graphics so I really can't rule them out I'd just prefer a more native option.

There's game software with PhysX support right? True it's implementation has been half arsed (driven more by money hatting than genuine interest) but there is little gain for game devs to introduce proper game changing elements exploitable by a single vendor. Also the general consensus among the PC gaming crowd is you need separate hardware to not interfere with graphics processing therefore an overwhelming majority would simply rather not see these features implemented (how many even run SLI?). Now that we've got both Intel and AMD mainstream solutions featuring similar co-processing elements as inseparable part of the package and a common language to exploit them, hopefully there is a gradual shift towards these sorts of computing solutions. The benefit for the end user would be enormous.

I expect (more like wish for) at least a few major titles to make use of accelerated processing by the time Trinity hits. High end middleware solutions like CryEngine would be an ideal promoter especially since these guys are known for trying to squeeze every ounce of performance from every available resource. Of course some greasing by Intel and/or AMD certainly wouldn't hurt.

Physx however I think is bust, I'd hope we don't compare OpenCL to Physx a year or two from now, that'd be painful. I really don't see OpenCL going that route since it's more encompassing than Physx so I do think it will survive and be used I'm just not sure it'll be used often in games but I'd love to be wrong.

 

[1-D_FTW]

NVM.

 

[·feist·]

AMD Fusion (Llano) demo (leaked) - Video 1 Multi Tasking w FaceReco 01262011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H9PUgT4XpA

 

[dekjo]

AMD Desktop Platforms

Some simple questions from someone who only partly gets this stuff:

1) Bulldozer will not have on-die GPU but the Llando APU will (though bulldozer platform may have onboard GPU based on chipset)?

2) Is the Llano coming out the same time as Bulldozer or later in the year?

Asking cause I guess I'm kind of curious if we'll end up with both on-die and on-board GPUs in the same system and how they'd work if you also had a discreet GPU. Would the on-die and on-board GPUs simply not be used since they'd most likely be so much less powerful than the discreet GPU? Or will they be able to complement each other based on the task being executed?

 

[Shubit]

Some simple questions from someone who only partly gets this stuff:

1) Bulldozer will not have on-die GPU but the Llando APU will (though bulldozer platform may have onboard GPU based on chipset)?

2) Is the Llano coming out the same time as Bulldozer or later in the year?

Asking cause I guess I'm kind of curious if we'll end up with both on-die and on-board GPUs in the same system and how they'd work if you also had a discreet GPU. Would the on-die and on-board GPUs simply not be used since they'd most likely be so much less powerful than the discreet GPU? Or will they be able to complement each other based on the task being executed?

Llano (which uses AMD's current K10.5 microarchitecture) has the IGP and PCIe controller integrated ondie and uses completely different chipsets than the upcoming Bulldozer based CPUs codenamed Zambezi. The Zambezi lineup is compatible with AMD's GX line of chipsets that provide integrated graphics should you desire to use them.

Llano has supposedly already shipped to system integrators (think Dell). As to it's availability in retail, nobody but AMD knows yet.

When you use a discrete GPU the motherboard BIOS usually automatically disables the IGP unless you set the option otherwise in the BIOS. The IGP and the discrete GPU can complement each other in a mode called Hybrid CrossFire but it's rather poor since your choice of discrete GPU is limited to ones that are architecture and speed wise similar to the onboard one. Since even top end integrated graphics are usually based on previous generation discrete chips of the mainstream market segment (not exactly gamers choice), HCF is not of much use to anyone.

Although I might have sparked interest by praising the possibility of accelerated processing above, note that the practical reality of it is still a year or two off. If you are after a high end workstation/gaming computer right now, you are better off by going with either a Bulldozer or SB based setup. For Bulldozer I recommend waiting for upcoming 900 series chipsets which are critical for enabling some of the new integral CPU features like core powergating and also bring SLI support (yippie kay yay finally).

Llano on the other hand will absolutely dominate in things like iMac or HTPC.