Posted by FeYz in
AMD just launched its new FX-series processors based on the Bulldozer architecture has not managed to deliver the performance they expect, a former engineer AMD's recently come out to share his vision on performance issues Bulldozer.
Cliff A. Maier has worked as a technical staff member of AMD until a few years ago, when leaving the company at the same time AMD has started to use automated tools to design its chips. According to the engineers, the fact that the Bulldozer tidah as expected all the people had nothing to do with performance issues, it is a key issue affecting the architecture is the application of techniques in the design of chip makers are automatic. Compared with traditional design techniques that rely on hand crafted performance-critical parts of the processor, automated tools speed the design process, but can not ensure maximum performance and efficiency.
"Management decided there should be a kind of cross-engineering [between AMD and ATI teams within the company], which means we should stop our CPU designs crafts and switch to SoC design style," said Maier in Insideris.com forum post.
Desktop version of AMD's Bulldozer has a total area of about 2 billion transistors, a number of very large, which makes it almost the size of the GPU chip and came to support the theory of Maier.
Each module Bullodzer, containing two computational core and 2MB unified L2 cache, including 213 million transistors and measures 30.9mm2 in size, which means that a quad-chip module should equal about 52 million transistors and take 123.6mm2 dead space.
In the design of AMD, this module comes with 8MB Level 3 cache, which should come to include approximately 405 million transistors, which means that about 800 million transistors dedicated to the memory controller, I / O interfaces and other logic.
This is a very big number no matter how you look at it, and just shy of 995 million transistors that are used by Intel in its Sandy Bridge processors also come with integrated graphics core and PCI Express controller.
Now we do not know if this is actually a large number of transistors needed or if it results from an automated tool for performance Bulldozer Maier blame, but it certainly seems like something fishy is going on with Bulldozer. (Through Xbit Labs)
