is there a large structural difference as far as number crunching goes with the phenom vs i7. Ive heard about floating point math or something like that that handles all the math on amd procesors, is this still the case? I googled and couldnt find a difference so I will ask. I would be able to do alot more with amd.

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and i am willing to give up ht just for the cheaper price really, input ?

Hi benjamin

As far as Rosetta is concerned, the fastest i5 (which is no doubt overclocked) has a similar average credit to the fastest AMD 1090T. I don't know what speeds they're running at but the i5 has 4 cores and the 1090T has 6, so the i5 is faster per core, but then you can get more AMD cores for the same money. With HT, the top end i7's listed are getting up to 20% more throughput again, but that might be at the expense of more than 20% more electricity. I'd like to give a straight answer but I don't have the info I'm afraid!

To be honest though, if you can wait a few weeks then it will be worth seeing how the 8-thread Bulldozer performs - latest rumour is 12th Oct release and that seems more robust as prices are appearing (quite low prices too) and the server versions are already shipping to the top tier builders.

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I have had my new build on hold for quite some time now.
Sooner or later AMD acctualy will release Bulldozer to us that would like play with it.
Though it is being a long wait.

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Sooner or later AMD acctualy will release Bulldozer to us that would like play with it.

See the test of BZ on the net.
It's a fake, bad processor...
The next Ivy Bridge of Intel will destroy it

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Sooner or later AMD acctualy will release Bulldozer to us that would like play with it.

See the test of BZ on the net.
It's a fake, bad processor...
The next Ivy Bridge of Intel will destroy it

Not sure what you mean by fake? Bulldozer's strengths are multi-threaded apps and its price point for those apps. It doesn't compete very well on low threaded workloads but Rosetta is massively multithreaded (at quite a coarse level) so it might do very well against Sandy Bridge on Rosetta, pound for pound.

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AMD's Bulldozer has been released to some underwhelming reviews. I was wondering if there was any information on how it performs for Rosetta.

I'm looking at a new crunching computer and I'm not sure which route to go.

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The main problem i see with Bulldozer is that it has only fore floating point units,
Each pair of integer core`s share one FPU, even though the FPU`s have been `optimized` to take account of this and do have supprizing performance as they are,
With BOINC projects that are FPU intensive surely this will be a bottle neck for us,
And in the few tests so far published the 1100T can keep up in many of the ways we are likely to use them when the CPU is subjected to 24/7 100% load and the fact of eight work units trying to use the limited number of FPU`s at the same time, only time will tell and when someone is brave enough to buy one and put it on Rosetta to see what it can do in real world tests.
I would still like to buy one but will wait a bit longer to see how things work out.

There is also a thread on seti@home about Bulldozy
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=65764

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The main problem i see with Bulldozer is that it has only fore floating point units,
Each pair of integer core`s share one FPU, even though the FPU`s have been `optimized` to take account of this and do have supprizing performance as they are,
With BOINC projects that are FPU intensive surely this will be a bottle neck for us,
And in the few tests so far published the 1100T can keep up in many of the ways we are likely to use them when the CPU is subjected to 24/7 100% load and the fact of eight work units trying to use the limited number of FPU`s at the same time, only time will tell and when someone is brave enough to buy one and put it on Rosetta to see what it can do in real world tests.
I would still like to buy one but will wait a bit longer to see how things work out.

There is also a thread on seti@home about Bulldozy
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=65764

I'm fairly sure I recall someone stating that Rosetta has more integer work than float. Not sure if that's true, and I can't find the thread but have foudn this: https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=4907...

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Thanks for the link,

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The main problem i see with Bulldozer is that it has only fore floating point units,
Each pair of integer core`s share one FPU, even though the FPU`s have been `optimized` to take account of this and do have supprizing performance as they are,
With BOINC projects that are FPU intensive surely this will be a bottle neck for us,
And in the few tests so far published the 1100T can keep up in many of the ways we are likely to use them when the CPU is subjected to 24/7 100% load and the fact of eight work units trying to use the limited number of FPU`s at the same time, only time will tell and when someone is brave enough to buy one and put it on Rosetta to see what it can do in real world tests.
I would still like to buy one but will wait a bit longer to see how things work out.

There is also a thread on seti@home about Bulldozy
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=65764

I'm fairly sure I recall someone stating that Rosetta has more integer work than float. Not sure if that's true, and I can't find the thread but have foudn this: https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=4907...

Either way it doesn't really matter. Bulldozer has one shared FPU per module for the new 256-bit instructions but for the traditional 128-bit instructions it's still 2 FPUs so no difference for Rosetta or any other app currently available. It would make sense therefor to restrict all the BOINC apps to 128-bit only.

I would like to see some Bulldozer Rosetta benchmarks as opposed to the synthetic ones we are seeing now.

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BBLounge - Broadband and Technology forum

A good, and rather long write up on `Dozer and the chips that will follow in it`s tracks can be found here,
I will leave you to decide weather `Dozer is a chip that in some ways arrived to early for what it is intended to do.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/10/can-amd-survive-bulldozers-disappointing-debut.ars

And on the first page of the review that photo is a loading shovel.
Ok, im`e being fussy :¬)

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I can now add that my Phenom II X3 (was an X2 with one of the disabled cores unlocked) (3GHz x 3 = 9GHz) slightly outperforms my Q6600 (2.4GHz x 4 = 9.6GHz). My E8400 (Q6600 = 65nm, Phenom II and E8400 = 45nm) gets a similar RAC to the Phenom II per core (both @ 3GHz).

My i3 gets a much lower score per core per GHz - I presume because of the limited cache. I run 2 tasks at a time rather than 4 as 1.5MB L2 cache is already stretched between two tasks. The credit per hour per core increases significantly when running one task on the i3 but running 2 tasks still gets through more work (just far from 2x as much).

I haven't measured the power consumption of any of them for a long time so can't comment on that front...

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I'm looking to upgrade my main PC and have been comparing some CPUs. Think I'll be going with a Sandy Bridge chip for Autodesk Inventor and Excel performance but in case it's of use, I've just done the maths on a Bulldozer/FX CPU. Looks like an 8-thread 8120 does quite well on Rosetta - this one:

https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/show_host_detail.php?hostid=1489011 is doing an average of 537 credits/thread/day = RAC of 4300. Don't know if it's overclocked but those figures are similar to an i7-2600. Not sure what the power consumption will be like with Rosetta as it tends to take it toward peak consumption but Prime95 uses more power on my PCs than Rosetta does.

Thought I'd post it seeing as I've checked...

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I have only used Intel to date on the project and have been very pleased with them. The good news is that either of these highend processors will do a great job and we look forward to another strong computer donating time to the project.

Buy one, get it up and running, connected to the project and crunching. The sooner you start the better. It would be difficult for either processor to make up for the delay of a perfect decision.

Thanks for your contribution to R@H!

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Thx!

Paul

I decided to wait for Ivy Bridge for the lower power and so hopefully the IGP will be sufficient for CAD. 8th April is the rumour...

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I decided to wait for Ivy Bridge for the lower power and so hopefully the IGP will be sufficient for CAD. 8th April is the rumour...

Unfortunately according to this Ivy Bridge has been delayed...

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I decided to wait for Ivy Bridge for the lower power and so hopefully the IGP will be sufficient for CAD. 8th April is the rumour...

Unfortunately according to this Ivy Bridge has been delayed...

VR-Zone says it's just the dual-core chips that are delayed:
http://vr-zone.com/articles/intel-is-only-delaying-dual-core-mobile-ivy-bridge-cpus/14933.html

Hope that's true!

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