AMD bulldozer and GMP

[Rick Hodgin]

> It is totally incomprehensible what AMD is doing.
> The new processor runs hot, slowly, and hardly
> outperforms a 5W processor for integer number
> crunching.  OK, they do, thanks to a 2x clock and
> a more cores. But clock-for-clock they are equal.

There was a lot of surprise in the CPU community when AMD released its early Bulldozers for internal benchmarking.  The additional cores provided far greater throughput overall, but so much was lost for lesser-parallelized applications that everyone was left scratching their heads and wondering what was going on (as you are doing now).

AMD was also surprised by its performance actually, indicating to many that it was an unexpected condition.  Yet, in the end there were some fixes made but nothing to bring it up to par with what everyone (outside of core development??) was expecting.

Best regards,
Rick C. Hodgin