Comment by phire

> (preferably integer) workloads like media encoding

Media encoding is actually an FPU workload, and a pretty brutal one at that.

Media encoding might not use much floating point arithmetic, but it does use massive amounts of packed integer SIMD. And all SIMD instructions (both integer and floating) execute on the shared FPU, not the integer unit. It's only scalar integer instructions that execute on the integer unit.

Which leads me to believe that Bulldozer's shared FPU is not a bottleneck at all. Most evidence seems to point to the shared frontend being the primary bottleneck (which is why steamroller puts some effort into duplicating the instruction decoding, for some pretty large IPC wins)