[Discuss] AMD FX-8120 update

[mark at buttery.org (Shirley Márquez Dúlcey)]

On 3/5/2012 7:44 PM, Shankar Viswanathan wrote:
>> This page has some info (including a useful diagram) that explains the
>> Bulldozer architecture:
>> http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fx-8150-zambezi-bulldozer-990fx,3043-3.html
>>
>
> If you want "straight from the horse's mouth" details on the Bulldozer
> architecture, please see my colleague Sean White's presentation at
> last year's Hotchips conference:
> http://hotchips.org/uploads/hc23/HC23.19.9-Desktop-CPUs/HC23.19.940-Bulldozer-White-AMD.pdf
>
> I'd be happy to explain the high-level details of the architecture to
> anyone that cares.
>
> -Shankar

Thanks for the link -- this stuff is fascinating. Perhaps BLU would be 
interested in a presentation.

I think my main point remains -- that the Bulldozer architecture makes 
task scheduling in the OS an important part of getting maximum 
performance. Going forward I suspect this will be increasingly important 
for both AMD and Intel processors, and for other architectures such as ARM.

The fact that the correct strategy for maximum performance may be 
different from the best power management strategy is likely to require 
new OS capabilities (changing the scheduling strategy based on power 
management settings). If I have four things running on a desktop system 
I'd likely prefer to spread them among all four modules for maximum 
speed, but on a laptop I might prefer to put them on only two modules 
and take the performance hit to get the power reduction of shutting off 
the other two modules.