AMD BULLDOZER

[wickedstangs]

All, I am up for new PC.. and have been looking at different options.. This sounds awesome...


My Current Setup..
Windows 7 Home Premium
Intel(R) Core(TM) 2 CPU 6300 @ 1.86GHz
HD 1 400 GB
HD 2 500 GB
NVIDIA GeForce 9400 GT 1024 MB or 1GB
MEMORY - 4096MB or 4GB
2 - 22" Monitors

AMDs bulldozer may actually catch up OR even surpass Intel coming in 2011.. AMD bulldozer series chip has not 4 cores, not 4 cores and a Hyper-threading like implementation like Intel but 8 physical cores and L2 memory shared in each module (4 modules in a chip, 2 cores per module) and fully shared L3 cache as well as supporting many new instructions that should result in at least a 30% increase in performance, its also supposed to be a 32 nm process chip. Bulldozer will feature two 128-bit FMA-capable FPUs which can be combined into one 256-bit FPU. This design is accompanied with two integer cores each with 4 pipelines (the fetch/decode stage is shared). Bulldozer will also introduce shared L2 cache in the new architecture. AMD calls this design a "Bulldozer module". The operating system will see each module as two physical cores and the chips will support between 8MB to 16MB of L3 cache shared among all Modules on the same silicon die. The only thing that I see as a
downside is Socket AM3+ (AM3r2)
- 938pin(?), DDR3 support
- will retain only backwards compatibility with previous Socket AM3/AM2 processors
meaning you can get a new board and keep all your old parts and later upgrade your CPU unlike a lot of Intel's upgradesso I suppose it technically could be a lot worse on your budget but its too bad they cant be dropped into current motherboards at reduced speed. It also has a new revision of the HT bus, Hyper Transport Technology rev.3.1 (3.20 GHz, 6.4 GT/s, 51.6 GB/s, 16-bit uplink/16-bit downlink) and hopefully these will be amazing for power usage since Min-Max Power Usage is 10-100 watts. Anyways what do you guys think?

Wow on top of that Intel seems to be taking a disliking to OCers since overclocking is limited to only 2-3% over the factory clock speed due to Intel locking the speed of every bus to the base clock. Of course they will release EE editions and probably K editions but no doubt that those will cost quite a bit more when I see a lot of people getting lower end Intel CPUs and OCing the hell out of em since that can sometimes be a better deal but I cant see someone spending $100 extra for an unlocked edition if they can get one at the speed they want for less, unless they are a hardcore OCer in which case they would usually go for the EE editions anyways.