killadoob may not want to bash AMD as a company, but I do. Yes, their GPU division, the former ATI, miraculously performs well. The CPU division does not.
The reason I say that is that it must have been obvious many months or even years ago, that this design would not outperform Phenom II on a clock for clock basis. Yes, it could potentially reach higher clocks, but that increases power draw. AMD essentially gambled, knowing full well that Intel had played this gamble and lost, that they could get clock speeds high enough to offset the lower IPC and keep power draw under control.
When the previous gen outperforms the latest gen in every single metric, and that includes cost to AMD to manufacture, you have to realize something went badly wrong. And dont tell me AMD knew this on October the 12th - they would have known it months if not years ago. Come on, they chopped away one third of Phenom II (in terms of execution resources) and hoped that extra L2 cache and higher clock speeds would hide that. They would have known, ages ago, that BD was simply not performing. Yet they still chose to release it.
Now, yes BD in some cases delivers great performance. It never delivers great performance for a 2 billion transistor chip, not compared to Sandy Bridge, but there are cases where its multi threaded performance is quite good. So, I would have been okay with it had AMD marketed this as a server chip, not branded it FX, not tried to mislead consumers with all that worlds fastest CPU malarkey. They set customer expectations up that this was a gaming and overclocking chip, when in fact Thuban is a better gaming chip. Lower power draw and better performance. They could simply have said that BD is a server chip, much like Intel has their Xeons and their Itaniums. Heck, the server market is an area that AMD has traditionally done better in than the desktop market. I would have been quite happy if they had gone after that. But BD for the desktop just does not make sense when I can buy a Thuban chip. So what makes me angry is that AMD thought they could mislead gamers into buying their chips, despite the fact that they are not suited to gaming.
Ideally a competent company would have put the brakes on this some time ago, when it became clear that IPC and clockspeed targets would not be met. Or changed the processors direction to better suit the server market. They did neither, they barreled on convinced it would somehow turn out okay. What kind of company just hopes that things turn out okay. AMD was hoping for two pretty big things - that Windows 8 would come out first with an improved scheduler, and that GlobalFoundries would be able to ramp 32nm production up so that clock speed targets would be met. I just find it amazing that they could design a chip relying so heavily on external factors over which they have no control. Its lunacy, and it didnt pay off, and now AMD have egg on their faces.
My CPU history goes K7-700, Athlon XP 2400+, Atlon 64 X2 5600+, Athlon II X4 620. That will be the last AMD CPU I buy, unless Piledriver comes out in 6 months and delivers a 50% IPC increase, higher clocks and lower power draw. Chances of that happening = 0.000000%
. I have tried to point it out to you like 3 times in the last few days but still it doesn't sink in and sadly people won't always agree with you and no matter how you act it won't change their feelings.
but in the meantime intel lowered their pricing on their goods so amd sadly didn't even become a viable cheap option because intel had that covered with performance and price.
