(02-02-2016, 10:19 PM)gstanford Wrote: More bulldozer derivates this close to Zen releasing?! Seriously AMD, what are you thinking?! Are you even thinking at all?!
Zen isn't due until the end of 2016 at the earliest. AMD is just real slow with clearing the inventory (trying to get rid of all Piledriver crap first, and then Steamroller..) - plus they didn't make that many Excavator quite yet due to low anticipated demand or perhaps they delayed it a bit to double the L2 cache for the desktop version??
Some are saying that it's supposed to have only 1MB cache per module like the mobile-version Excavators, rather than 2MB, for a total of 4MB - that it's a blatant lie by AMD.
Maybe AMD wanted to save the thunder for Zen, hoping it would be ready much earlier in 2016, but then realized that with such limited budget and resources, they wouldn't be able to get Zen ready until later.
Here's probably the only serious article about comparing the IPC improvements of Excavator vs Steamroller vs Piledriver (all at the same clock, multi-core and with 1 core):
http://www.planet3dnow.de/cms/18564-amd-...cinebench/
(the link has many more pages of benches)
Not too shabby - the improvements are quite large, eh? The AVX2 improvements are nice, but it probably throttled in one instance with the 15W TDP ceiling (if that's what others were saying)?
This is how Bulldozer should have been performing in the first place, if AMD had Intel's R&D budget. It's just not so exciting for AMD to say that they finally fixed it on 28nm after so many years...