AMD misplaces 800m transistors per CPU, guesses that's why they're so slow

[Dryden]

http://www.techpowerup.com/156123/A...illion-LESS-Transistors-Than-It-Thought-.html

AMD Realizes That Bulldozer Has 800 Million LESS Transistors Than It Thought!

AMD's new flagship Bulldozer "FX" series of processors have turned out to be mediocre performers in almost every review and benchmark going, sometimes even getting bested by the existing Phenom II and certainly no match for their Intel competition. To add to this tale of fail, it now turns out that AMD didn't even know how many transistors they have! Anand Lal Shimpi of AnandTech received an email from AMD's PR department and this is the revelation he had to share with us:

This is a bit unusual. I got an email from AMD PR this week asking me to correct the Bulldozer transistor count in our Sandy Bridge E review. The incorrect number, provided to me (and other reviewers) by AMD PR around 3 months ago was 2 billion transistors. The actual transistor count for Bulldozer is apparently 1.2 billion transistors. I don't have an explanation as to why the original number was wrong, just that the new number has been triple checked by my contact and is indeed right. The total die area for a 4-module/8-core Bulldozer remains correct at 315 mm?.

 

[sandgk]

Losing one transistor, Mr. AMD, might be considered a misfortune ....

 

[Buckeneye]

As much as I've loved some of their products, especially from 2002-2006. The company has/had been run by the seat of is pants for some time now.

Once Intel got its shit together with Dothan, they just ran with it. Given the resources they have (Intel) in Marketing and R&D. AMD's margin for error was very small.

Even after successful runs from thunderbird all the way to clawhammer, sledgehammer & barcelona ... AMD still didn't have name recognition on that "mainstream" market... with, you know - "dumb" people. Like Intel seems to have.

This type of performance setback, is not only a PR nightmare - but harmful to every other series of CPU under the AMD name.

Reminds me of what Intel was doing in the end of the Northwood into Prescott, Presler, Smithfield era....

edit: dig some digging... exactly what I was thinking.


http://www.extremetech.com/computing/100583-analyzing-bulldozers-scaling-single-thread-performance

excerpt " AMD lengthened the CPU’s pipeline and increased latencies throughout the architecture.
The concept of building chips for higher frequency has had a bad rap since the disastrous Prescott Pentium 4;
after seeing Bulldozer’s overall performance, AMD’s decision to take this route may not have been a very good one."


-- Longer pipeline, more stages = need for higher clock speeds for performance. Increasing TDP is apparently something AMD doesn't care about?