eTeknix Tech Review Of 2011

Quarter 4 -eTeknix Tech Review of 2011

October: AMD launch Bulldozer, Or is that Faildozer?

October was a month dominated by AMD hype, The Bulldozer launch was due and the AMD marketing time was having a field day spreading the word. However, the processor was received badly, only managing to provide similar performance to Sandy Bridge when it came to multi-threaded comparisons (how can 8 cores not be better than 4) but when it came to core per core comparisons Sandy Bridge blew Bulldozer away. Bulldozer also disappointed with high temperatures, high power consumption and relatively high pricing when comparing performance with Sandy Bridge (2500K costs £155~ whilst the equivalent Bulldozer the FX 8120/8150 costs about £10-30 more). Certainly not a good month for AMD and perhaps this is arguably the nail in the coffin for AMDss high end desktop processor hopes. Only time will tell.

November: Intel raises the bar once again as Sandy Bridge-E arrives

As if the gap between Intel and AMD wasn’t big enough Sandy Bridge-E arrived to extend it. In fact, Sandy Bridge-E seems like Intel’s way of competing with itself to further raise the bar in performance. With more pins, 2011 instead of 1155, Intel was now able to offer 8 cores (although only 8 on Xeons) or 6 cores with the additional bandwidth provided. The new Sandy Bridge-E processors only provide (currently) a minor increase in performance over Sandy Bridge architecture since most games cannot take advantage of more than 4 cores however the 3930K is certainly a really top notch performer of a CPU coming in £350 cheaper than the 3960X and still offering similar performance. X79 and Sandy Bridge-E was released by Intel to be the X58 replacement, although given the overwhelming success of Sandy Bridge we wouldn’t be surprised if most people opt for that instead and save themselves a couple hundred pounds.

December: AMD redeem themselves with launch of the world’s fastest single GPU card, the  HD 7970

Its probably all you’ve been hearing about for the last month or so in the tech world but as the single most important even of December its definitely worth mentioning again. AMD launched the first 28nm graphics card, which takes the crown as the fastest single GPU card on the planet. Able to comfortably dispatch of the GTX 580 and pull within touching distance (especially after overclocking) of the GTX 590 and HD 6990 the HD 7970 is certainly a fantastic card. The 28nm technology has given it more transistors, lower power consumption and lower temperatures while the redesigned architecture has given it substantially better tessellation allowing it to finally compete against Nvidia cards in that region. What a great way for AMD to end the year, Bulldozer aside. Lets see if Nvidia can respond in its usual fashion in 2012.