Here are some pictures (from E3 via 4gamer.net) of the Bulldozer FX 8000, AMD’s upcoming 8-core CPU. The screenies show the new OverDrive, AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) instruction set, the FLEX floating point…
AMD Bulldozer FX 8000, 8-Core Desktop CPU in Demo at E3
Can someone count cores, i can’t there are different sizes cores on that die?
http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/news/2010-08/amd_orochi_august2010.jpg
kind of misses the point for gaming at least, since GPU is more important.
This rather cool, I wonder how powerful the GPU is. Even if its no good for gaming it will be perfect for OpenCL due to their being to latency between CPU and GPU (which is a problem with discrete GPUs).
[quote]kind of misses the point for gaming at least, since GPU is more important.[/quote[
ignorance like this needs to be eradicated
the CPU is most important because everything that the gpu is told to render is done so via the cpu
I still agree, that the gpu is more important for gaming.
Nowadays most apis strive to render as much as possible with as few as possible commands issued by the cpu (instanced rendering, buffers,…). Ultimately there will probably be only one call to render the whole scene.
Also often the performance of graphics intensive applications does not scale too well with the number of cores as the drivers don’t like multithreading too much.
@Squall Leonhart
Then explain how even the best CPUs are barely used to full effect in any modern game…most games I play the CPU rarely gets above 50% use on my i7 3.8ghz. aside from benchmarking and apps, CPU dont really do much for gaming once you got a midrange quadcore unless you are running a scaled system with say 2 or 3 GPUs on SLI.
@WTF
That is easily explained. Games are written with few threads in mind. Actually in most of them, there is one basic thread and all others follow suit.
The reason you are seeing 50% cpu usage on your i7, is because not all threads are used.
Also keep in mind that in some games you may witness, let’s say 50% usage on one thread, 50% on another thread and some 10-30% on a couple of other threads.
This 50+50 could be one 100% thread that is switched between cores. This way, you end up cpu limited, even if you are getting a cpu usage of 30%. Especially in i7 where the HT makes confuses things even more.
To say it otherwise, if you have one basic software thread, that needs 100% of one cpu thread and 10% of the other threads (i7 in mind here), you end up to be cpu limited, while task manager will be showing 100+10+10+10+10+10+10+10=170% out of a possible 800%, so the total cpu usage would be 21.25%.
The above example could take different forms, where you could have 50+50+blah blah due to thread switching and so forth and so on.
That is why gamers need the most IPC the can get. Core count is irrelevant.
I can bet you right now, that a 2120k@5Ghz will be enough for 95% of the games, giving framerates in excess of 60fps.
“The reason you are seeing 50% cpu usage on your i7, is because not all threads are used”
@Psolord, that supports my point LOL, even with HT off and just 4 real cores enabled the CPU is largely idling at sub 50% (even looking at the cores as individuals they all hitting similar scores +/- 5%.
CPUs are important for gaming but they have advanced beyond the level that they make a huge difference. A Radeon HD 6850 with a pre-Wolfedale Core2Duo will run Crysis on high settings with 8xAA at top resolution with around 50-60fps. How do I know? I tried it last night on my friend’s old Dell XPS rig when we replaced his old GeForce 8800GT with a new Radeon HD 6850 1GB. If that doesn’t prove that CPUs have become more or less irrelevant for most games, I don’t know what will since pretty much EVERYTHING on the market would spank a pre-Wolfedale Core2Duo.
@WTF @Avro
The CPU handles everything else, the game won’t run otherwise, sure the GFX side is pretty much handled by the GFX card but it’s only a chuck of the data.
The real reason why you see very little processor usage over a single core or duel core is the whole CPU chunk is spread over all the cores, It’s the OS that handles that part even the GFX calls are handled by DirectX or OpenGL and those are managed by the OS which is all run via the CPU, which is simply handing over vectors and other stuff to the GFX API which sends it all off to the GFX hardware.
The funny thing is you say your I7 is pointless yet you forget that it’s 4 cores running at a min of 2.8gig each and ALL 4 cores are hyperthreaded pretty much making it a 8 core CPU so anything that hits a I7 is chewed up and spat back out extremely quick.
Yet you can’t figure out why games bearly fuss it.
What you really need to do to push it to the limits is to get a 3D program and ray trace a scene and your GFX card won’t get touched as it’s all maths based in reverse so rendering a scene via GFX card doesn’t work as the APIs only work with the light going forwards.
That’s why Nvidia have made the GPU APIs more like a CPU as you can then use it more in the 3D programs
sweet i would love to use this amazing cpu but at this time i am STILL waiting for my bulldozer to ring my door bell
ordered it 11/8/11 and its STILL NOT HERE!!!
i talk to D.I.T. Computers they are waiting on back order, NewEgg still is out of stock 95% of the time.
AMD Venders, WHAT ARE YOU DOING, WHERE ARE ALL THE FX AT??????????
HOW DO YOU EXPECT TO MAKE ANYTHING WHEN YOU CAN’T EVEN SUPPLY WHAT YOU’R SELLIN!!!!!!!!!!!