Windows 7 AMD Bulldozer Hotfix

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Microsoft has just posted a hotfix that optimizes the performance of AMD Bulldozer processors on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 systems. Thanks to maboblivion, Redshirt #24 and Kromix for the heads up.

This article introduces an update that optimizes the performance of AMD Bulldozer CPUs that are used by Windows 7-based or Windows Server 2008 R2-based computers. Currently, the performance of AMD Bulldozer CPUs is slower than expected. This behavior occurs because the threading logic in Windows 7 and in Windows Server 2008 R2 is not optimized to use the Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) scheduling feature. This feature was introduced in the Bulldozer family of AMD CPUs.
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I'm going to bet on this equalling some improvement, but not being enough to suddenly cause earlier conclusions about Bulldozer to be totally invalid. The CPU is a disappointment. I don't think this patch will change that. Sucking less is still sucking.
 
ValVed RaY said:
If there is an actual difference, Will you guys do an update to your review?
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I would also like to see some official [H] benchmarks with this patch, particularly how it stacks up against the X6. If this can get a BD at least faster than my 1090, I'd be in for one.
 
I was under the impression that the Linux guys have been running with similar patches already (and the cache changes that were so polemic a few months ago), and while it does improve, it's not enough to tilt the scale.
 
Yeah it doesn't have to be a i7 killer, just faster than a X6. I want to stick with AMD for sentimental reasons but only if buying one of their new procs is actually an upgrade.
 
I too would like to see an update around this fix, I am really curious about the real-world impact it has.
 
MacLeod said:
Yeah it doesn't have to be a i7 killer, just faster than a X6. I want to stick with AMD for sentimental reasons but only if buying one of their new procs is actually an upgrade.
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I don't understand buying anything for sentimental reasons if it's inferior. :confused:
 
I don't understand either Dan, but I want an FX now too. Not to replace anything of course, but just as an additional PC. But yeah, I think I got the same kinda brain damage as this dude, lol.
 
Looking forward to before/after benchmarks.

As has been stated, I wanted to buy this CPU, regardless of whether or not it kept up with Intels offerings, as I believed it to be fast enough for me anyway. When it turned out to not beat my existing X6, and RO2 wasn't running well on my existing X6@4ghz, I gave up and bought an intel chip.
 
You guys are so loose and free with your money, especially right before the new Nvidia and ATI video cards are coming out? On experiments no less. Ahh, to be young, free and careless.

The new ATI cards are due out within these next 45 days. Bullsnoozer or 7970 2gig's of Badassery? Hrmmm .. easy choice for me.

Just kidding, go knock yourself out with that BD and that new patch lol. I'm sure the patch has turned BD into monster. :)
 
I just ordered the Core i5 2400 today thanks to the $10 off coupon at New Egg. I was comparing the FX processors because this is for a production computer (video, graphics). From the looks of early reports on other sites the performance increase is either small or un-noticeable. Too bad, I was looking forward to 6 cores/threads or 8 cores/threads for ~$200.
 
Dan_D said:
I don't understand buying anything for sentimental reasons if it's inferior. :confused:
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These AMD fans are complete nut jobs, some of the actually think that the media is trying to smear AMD and make them look bad. A few others think a bios update/patch will fix everything and a few more think if they compiled the program with gcc it will make everything better.

This launch reminds me more and more of the R600 launch. Remember this, "Hey guys they released a new driver that fixes everything, think you could run another review for us?". It never ends, and these people will keep coming up with magical fixes so "their" product wins.
 
i got the FX-6100 for $99 on black friday :p and was faster than my then Phenom2 as i had a quad core ;D so double upgrade for me, plus i will get Win 8 when it comes out at student price knowing that Win 8 will have multithread support :D i got my copy of 7-64 Ultimate for 30 buck-a-roos :p
 
sc3252 said:
These AMD fans are complete nut jobs, some of the actually think that the media is trying to smear AMD and make them look bad. A few others think a bios update/patch will fix everything and a few more think if they compiled the program with gcc it will make everything better.

This launch reminds me more and more of the R600 launch. Remember this, "Hey guys they released a new driver that fixes everything, think you could run another review for us?". It never ends, and these people will keep coming up with magical fixes so "their" product wins.
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There are a few crazies, that's for sure.

Then there are a whole bunch who prefer to not support Intel and are OK with lesser performing CPU's as long as the lesser performance of the CPU doesn't impact what they want to do with their computer.

This is the camp I was in for a long time. For all my uses and games I played my AMD Phenom II X6@4Ghz despite not being as fast as a Sandy Bridge, was fast enough.

Then I started playing red Orchestra 2 which is unusually unforgiving on the CPU. When BD showed itself not to be much of an upgrade over my Phenom II @4ghz, I reluctantly decided to buy an Intel chip.

You have to understand. While some did, I was never really comparing Bulldozer to Intel. I felt pretty certain it wasn't going to come close to competing with SB. I was just looking for a performance increase over my Phenom II. First when it became evident that AMD could not provide a good experience in RO2, did I start looking to Intel.
 
Dan_D said:
Again it won't change anything. It will just make Bulldozer look slightly less bad.
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Again, that's all it will take for some.

If I had any confidence that Bulldozer was going to improve enough to allow RO2 to run well for me (which I'm still not convinced this accomplishes) I would have stuck it out and got a BD rather than going Intel.

It didn't need to bring it up ti SB levels of performance, it just needed to be fast enough to get the job done, and it failed at that.
 
I don't think you need to be a nutjob to prefer AMD to intel, intel has done some pretty unethical shit business wise over the years, and as a result I prefer AMD.
 
I will emulate your FX-6100 with my IVY Bridge and 32gigs of STABLE DDR3 @ 2133. Hell, I would even have spare cpu cycles to emulate a few Phenom2's while I'm at it :)
 
Kromix said:
i got the FX-6100 for $99 on black friday :p and was faster than my then Phenom2 as i had a quad core ;D so double upgrade for me, plus i will get Win 8 when it comes out at student price knowing that Win 8 will have multithread support :D i got my copy of 7-64 Ultimate for 30 buck-a-roos :p
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Ahh, well I believe Windows OS has had multithread support for a while now....;)
And from all indications, the new scheduler (basically what this patch is) will not perform miracles on hardware that wasn't ready for public release...
 
Kromix said:
emulate my money saved :p on the ivybridge and mobo, :)
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Ivy Bridge isn't here yet and we don't know it's pricing beyond speculation that for the most part it will be unchanged from today's Sandy Bridge CPU's. And the motherboard argument gets made time and time again but for around $100 you can get a damned good Intel chipset based board from MSI, Gigabyte or ASUS. Try again. Bulldozer isn't all that much cheaper than Sandy Bridge and I'd argue that the performance increase is worth it.
 
stealthy123 said:
I don't think you need to be a nutjob to prefer AMD to intel, intel has done some pretty unethical shit business wise over the years, and as a result I prefer AMD.
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It would be naive to think AMD is more ethical than Intel. If they could get away with the stuff that Intel supposedly did they sure as hech would try. To think your buying based purely on good vs evil is just dumb...You could say that about every company that has a stranglehold on a specific market segment. I get the best price/performance hardware I can, from whatever company offers it.
 
stealthy123 said:
I don't think you need to be a nutjob to prefer AMD to intel, intel has done some pretty unethical shit business wise over the years, and as a result I prefer AMD.
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I did too, but just remember who sold you a gilded turd and claimed it was the next best thing since sliced bread.

AMD PR/Marketing was utterly horrendous in the buildup to the Bulldozer launch. This "ultimate gaming processor" had an FX moniker and to this day still has BIOS issues related to clock speed throttling and can't play certain titles. Just think of all the people who bought am3+ motherboards that listened to JF-AMD's rhetoric and ended up sticking a six-core thuban inside after they saw that the Bulldozers' couldn't even beat their own predecessors.

Intel has done worse, but after AMD's recent tactics I don't think there's a good guy in this race.

http://www.overclock.net/t/1185039/the-1st-windows-7-scheduler-patch-results-are-in-have-fun

Single-threaded performance is still the same (that was never going to change), but it seems the threads may be aligning a bit better. Also, it appears as if the processor is being shown as 4 cores 8 threads, which is more accurate if we're honest. This thing was never a true 8 core chip
 
sorry I have convictions, and I don't bend them.

Had AMD had the opportunity to do what intel did, maybe they would have, but they didn't, and as such I prefer to support them with my money.

Ifs and buts don't change what happened.
 
pelo said:
I did too, but just remember who sold you a gilded turd and claimed it was the next best thing since sliced bread.

AMD PR/Marketing was utterly horrendous in the buildup to the Bulldozer launch. This "ultimate gaming processor" had an FX moniker and to this day still has BIOS issues related to clock speed throttling and can't play certain titles. Just think of all the people who bought am3+ motherboards that listened to JF-AMD's rhetoric and ended up sticking a six-core thuban inside after they saw that the Bulldozers' couldn't even beat their own predecessors.

Intel has done worse, but after AMD's recent tactics I don't think there's a good guy in this race.
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Bro, I spent 4 grand on a p4 first gen with rambus, intel lied through their fucking teeth about netburst, and shoved it down consumers throats for years, while using backdoor tactics to keep the superior AMD cpus out of OEM systems.

AMD hasn't ever done anything to consumers like that.
 
sc3252 said:
These AMD fans are complete nut jobs, some of the actually think that the media is trying to smear AMD and make them look bad. A few others think a bios update/patch will fix everything and a few more think if they compiled the program with gcc it will make everything better.

This launch reminds me more and more of the R600 launch. Remember this, "Hey guys they released a new driver that fixes everything, think you could run another review for us?". It never ends, and these people will keep coming up with magical fixes so "their" product wins.
Click to expand...

welcome to the term Fanboy, doesn't matter if its AMD, intel, Nvidia or any other product, its the same crap from every group.



pelo said:
I did too, but just remember who sold you a gilded turd and claimed it was the next best thing since sliced bread.

AMD PR/Marketing was utterly horrendous in the buildup to the Bulldozer launch. This "ultimate gaming processor" had an FX moniker and to this day still has BIOS issues related to clock speed throttling and can't play certain titles. Just think of all the people who bought am3+ motherboards that listened to JF-AMD's rhetoric and ended up sticking a six-core thuban inside after they saw that the Bulldozers' couldn't even beat their own predecessors.

Intel has done worse, but after AMD's recent tactics I don't think there's a good guy in this race.

http://www.overclock.net/t/1185039/the-1st-windows-7-scheduler-patch-results-are-in-have-fun

Single-threaded performance is still the same (that was never going to change), but it seems the threads may be aligning a bit better. Also, it appears as if the processor is being shown as 4 cores 8 threads, which is more accurate if we're honest. This thing was never a true 8 core chip
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quite frankly its their own damn fault if what he said decided whether or not they bought an AM3+ or bulldozer processor. anything and everything he mentioned was only about the server side of bulldozer since that was his marketing field. he never talked about the consumer desktop side of bulldozer.
 
i had an AM3+ mobo a while before i got my FX-6100, and it was a cheaper upgrade than rebuying intel mobo/cpu, I have never had an issue with the BIOS, it OC nicely, i dont have any issues playing RO2, or any game for that matter... so, so far i have not seen any downside in my purchase. plus, my old CPU went to a 2ndary computer and that old CPU went to the server/media center... no loss at all and that old CPU became a keychain :D
 
stealthy123 said:
Bro, I spent 4 grand on a p4 first gen with rambus, intel lied through their fucking teeth about netburst, and shoved it down consumers throats for years, while using backdoor tactics to keep the superior AMD cpus out of OEM systems.

AMD hasn't ever done anything to consumers like that.
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Then windows seeing this as an actual 4 core 8 threaded chip does what, exactly? If we're honest, this was never an 8 core chip to begin with. Is marketing it as an 8 core lying to consumers? Sharing L2 cache, single FPU (split 128), single decoder/fetch is what, then?

I remember hearing the +25% performance gains over an i7 920 and thinking "wow this will be awesome." Then when Sandy came out, they also said 50% better than a phenom II, and I still thought it could compete. The chip sets an overclocking record and we're led to believe it can overclock very well. None of these things turned out to be true, and if they are "true" they're extremely selective and only apply to a select few applications that nobody really cares for. Hell, what about the claim that IPC stayed the same? It didn't. It's 10% lower and in AMD's own answers here in the [H] thread they're tripping over themselves when trying to answer and account for that difference.

Needless to say, I wasn't happy. I nearly bought an am3+ board but decided against it at the last moment. Had I bought an am3+ board, I'd have been utterly pissed at AMD for selling me a turd sandwich. They overstated their progression and the chips never lived up to expectations nor handily defeated the 45nm thubans. That's a fail, dude.

I still hope BD owners can get whatever they can from the scheduler and the chip performs as best as possible. Nobody wants to see people wasting their money
 
what if you are into 2 girls 1 cup? :/ not that i am, but your turn sandwitch would be selling like hot fudge... :p in all seriousness... i was bummed, and still am bummed at AMD but hey, i'm also not paying retail price for my equipment :)
 
Nuffsed said:
I don't understand either Dan, but I want an FX now too. Not to replace anything of course, but just as an additional PC. But yeah, I think I got the same kinda brain damage as this dude, lol.
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lol I have that brain damage also. It wont be for a couple more months but I am going to build an 8150 myself. I just want to tinker with it. I'm sure it will play any games fine that I play and besides I do alot of video encoding. Used to buy nothing but AMD but my last two PC's have been Intel. Be a new toy/platform to mess around with.
 
pelo said:
Then windows seeing this as an actual 4 core 8 threaded chip does what, exactly? If we're honest, this was never an 8 core chip to begin with. Is marketing it as an 8 core lying to consumers? Sharing L2 cache, single FPU (split 128), single decoder/fetch is what, then?

I remember hearing the +25% performance gains over an i7 920 and thinking "wow this will be awesome." Then when Sandy came out, they also said 50% better than a phenom II, and I still thought it could compete. The chip sets an overclocking record and we're led to believe it can overclock very well. None of these things turned out to be true, and if they are "true" they're extremely selective and only apply to a select few applications that nobody really cares for. Hell, what about the claim that IPC stayed the same? It didn't. It's 10% lower and in AMD's own answers here in the [H] thread they're tripping over themselves when trying to answer and account for that difference.

Needless to say, I wasn't happy. I nearly bought an am3+ board but decided against it at the last moment. Had I bought an am3+ board, I'd have been utterly pissed at AMD for selling me a turd sandwich. They overstated their progression and the chips never lived up to expectations nor handily defeated the 45nm thubans. That's a fail, dude.

I still hope BD owners can get whatever they can from the scheduler and the chip performs as best as possible. Nobody wants to see people wasting their money
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it's two cores with shared resources, they didn't lie to you, there are 8 cores not 4.

they didn't claim the ipc stayed the same, they admitted to a drop in ipc but thought they could over come it with clock speed. If you lose 10 percent ipc but gain 10 percent in clocks then the performance is a push, they counted on being able to clock it high enough, they obviously miscalculated. There was no lying, there was a little bit of marketing, but 90 percent of the stuff I saw was fanboys spouting off.

I bought an am3+ board when they came out, snagged an fx-4100 a couple weeks back for 80 bux off some idiot on ebay who bought into the whole "faildozer" crap and took a loss on a brand new processor. Replaced my phenom 2 x2, gave my dad that processor, used his processor to build my nephews a pc for xmas with an am2+ board I have. Sorry, I got dick all reason to be mad at AMD they gave me a merry xmas this year.
 
I'd like to see AMD pull out of this slump in performance. It just feels like it's snowballing on them.
 
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