Fudzilla: We have some good news for everyone who would like to see AMD make a big comeback in style.
When is a CPU core not a CPU core?
TechPowerUp: On our front page, we placed a poll in mid-September, ahead of AMD FX Processor family launch (based on the "Bulldozer" architecture).
At the time of counting today, "Bulldozer" edged past "Our Politicians". At the start of polling, people were evenly optimistic about both Bulldozer and Sandy Bridge-E. Politicians were off to a flying start, and although there were a few spikes, their votes per day figure was decreasing. On 12th October (AMD FX launch day), Bulldozer got a Noah's flood of fail votes.
The desktop benchmark scores for AMD's new Bulldozer architecture didn't make happy reading for fans of the chip company, with the new design sometimes failing to beat AMD's own predecessor architecture, let alone Intel's comparable offerings. Hope still persisted, however, that the processor's architecture might fare better when tasked with server workloads. With the release last week of AMD's first Bulldozer server processors, branded the Opteron 6200 series and codenamed "Interlagos," a host of such benchmarks have arrived from AMD and others.
Unfortunately for AMD, it looks as though the decisions that hurt Bulldozer on the desktop continue to hurt it in the server room. Although the server benchmarks don't show the same regressions as were found on the desktop, they do little to justify the design of the new architecture.
No doubt these chips will be great in the lower budget, AMD has always been good with that. It's about time AMD got off that ancient 45nm fab and on to 32nm. Bulldozer won't just be a refresh of previously released chips, which is pretty much what AMD has been doing with the recent Phenoms and Athlons.