AMD Bulldozer Chess Benchmarks

[FlavusSnow]

Looks like there was a Fritz chess benchmark run on an engineering sample of a "Bulldozer" chip clocked at 3.2 Ghz.

8 threads = 14,197 kn/sec

http://vr-zone.com/articles/purported-a ... 12914.html

This is roughly equivalent to a 6-threaded result an Intel i7-970, but of course with 2 additional threads. I'd be very interested in seeing the single thread benchmark on the bulldozer chip in order to see how efficient their new SMT technology is...but at least this is something.

I'm guessing that 8 threads on the Bulldozer will be negligibly slower time to ply than 6 threads on a 6-core i7, but faster than 12 threads on the same i7.

So no miracles, but certainly a TOP performing chip (at chess anyways) at 1/3rd the price.

[rbarreira]

Interesting (though you never know, leaks could always be fake).

It seems to me Bulldozer doesn't really use SMT. The modules actually do contain duplicated hardware for each core, only sharing some parts like instruction decoding and floating-point stuff. So what we're seeing here is probably an 8-core chip from the perspective of a chess program.

I'm not expecting AMD to make a top-performing chip, but I do expect them to launch a well-performing chip at a very competitive price (especially when you throw motherboard prices into the comparison vs Intel, in which case AMD systems are usually more affordable given a performance level).

[rbarreira]

I'd be very interested in seeing the single thread benchmark on the bulldozer chip in order to see how efficient their new SMT technology is...but at least this is something.

These comparisons are messy due to the Turbo mode:

chip clocked at 3.2 GHz. The Turbo Core 2.0 can up the clock speed up to 3.6 GHz with all cores active, or a whopping 4.2 GHz with only 50% (i.e. 4 cores) active.