Bulldozer Reviews

[ironsight2000]

http://www.hardocp.c...formance_review

http://www.hardocp.c...formance_review

kinda disappointing what do you guys think?

[Open Minded]

What makes me most sad, is that some benchmarks are actually worse than the PII x4 and x6 chips. You would think there would be improvement across the board. :/

[Muhammad Farrukh]

Who cares?

I am disappointed, completely.

[neoadorable]

why disappointed? these seem like great CPUs for the money, definitely will get one when i build my next PC - next year. AM3+, 7000 series GPU, 16GB RAM, Win 8, FX CPU, PCI Express 3.0...yummy.

[ViperAFK]

why disappointed? these seem like great CPUs for the money, definitely will get one when i build my next PC - next year. AM3+, 7000 series GPU, 16GB RAM, Win 8, FX CPU, PCI Express 3.0...yummy.

at ~200 dollars the i5-2500 still seems like an overall better performer for the price... Don't get me wrong, these aren't necessarily bad for the price they are at, but it doesn't seem like they are the best choice. I wasn't expecting them to take the top performance crown, but I was expecting better performance than these benchmarks show :/. I'm glad I got sick of them delaying bulldozer and went sandybridge.

[Yusuf M. Veteran]

Ouch. For gaming, it looks like the Core i5-2500K is the better choice.

[TheLegendOfMart]

why disappointed? these seem like great CPUs for the money, definitely will get one when i build my next PC - next year. AM3+, 7000 series GPU, 16GB RAM, Win 8, FX CPU, PCI Express 3.0...yummy.

When an 8 Core CPU can barely keep up with a 4 Core CPU then theres something severly wrong.

[Draconian Guppy]

^^ Agreed :s

[ARchamps]

Wow that is really surprising. I'm sure it will really annoy those who were waiting for this.

[+LogicalApex MVC]

Seems like AMD hasn't yet returned to the glory they held in the Athlon days.

[yxz]

http://www.anandtech...x8150-tested/11

AMD also shared with us that Windows 7 isn't really all that optimized for Bulldozer. Given AMD's unique multi-core module architecture, the OS scheduler needs to know when to place threads on a single module (with shared caches) vs. on separate modules with dedicated caches. Windows 7's scheduler isn't aware of Bulldozer's architecture and as a result sort of places threads wherever it sees fit, regardless of optimal placement. Windows 8 is expected to correct this, however given the short lead time on Bulldozer reviews we weren't able to do much experimenting with Windows 8 performance on the platform. There's also the fact that Windows 8 isn't expected out until the end of next year, at which point we'll likely see an upgraded successor to Bulldozer.

[Tekkerson]

^This sounds like it has some merit. Some of that single core performance is worse than their previous 4-cores. I refuse to believe that a new processor would actually yield less performance than their new one considering how it has nearly 2 billion transistors

[Phouchg]

A technically well-founded excuse. However, it isn't a sound business strategy to design a whole processor architecture (and then advertise it with a help of a steamroll) when the most popular desktop OS (whole current Windows lineup) doesn't even properly support it and, more so, a costly upgrade to Windows 8 is to be mandatory when it finally comes out. Or will AMD pack in a free Windows 8 upgrade coupon with the CPU itself?

Any info on whether Linux kernel has the necessary support for these paraplegic cores?

[giantpotato]

This is quite disappointing. I'll probably still upgrade to Bulldozer eventually, since there is a nice upgrade path. Buy an AM3+ motherboard now to use with my existing components, then buy an FX processor once the kinks are worked out and Windows 8 is closer to release.

[Singh400]

To be honest, it was going to be a near ****ing miracle to beat the i7's...

[metal_dragen Veteran]

Was really hoping these were at least going to bring AMD up to par with the Core chips. I've been an AMD fan for years and all my desktops have been AMD chips since the K6.

I guess I can stop holding off my new build and just buy a Sandy Bridge setup. I can't wait another 6+ months for Piledriver and only a 10-15% improvement when I can get that now in Sandy Bridge.

[Draconian Guppy]

Yeah it sux AMD doesn't seem to get there ass in gear, say what you want about price/performance ratio, in the PC business it's who has the fastest.

[Slammers]

Semi kicking myself for going AM3 a few months ago. Oh well. Hopefully they've sorted them selves out a little by the time I wan to upgrade....

[Andre S. Veteran]

The single-threaded performance of this CPU is incredibly bad. It gets beaten by its own ancient predecessors in single-threaded benchmarks. AMD even states explicitely in its reviewer guide that the CPU will be poor in gaming benchmarks.

See the AnandTech review.

That said, it didn't fare bad at all in HardOCP's gaming benchmarks, which is kinda surprising.

[TheLegendOfMart]

http://www.anandtech...x8150-tested/11

Typical AMD, blame everyone else.

If they had any sense they would have contacted Microsoft and worked with them to make a patch, not sit there and delay BD over and over and over and over again and when it finally releases and is another failure like Phenom II then sit there and blame everyone else.

[Anthonyd]

Every day i bless AMD fanboys because thanks to them I can keep buying cheap & powerfull Intel CPUs :)

[Motoko.]

[Dapen]

I'm dissapointed from this... I thought an all AMD system would have been a good choice when this is released, how wrong was I?!

[HoochieMamma]

That said, it didn't fare bad at all in HardOCP's gaming benchmarks, which is kinda surprising.

Exactly

"We played a lot of Battlefield 3 Beta Multiplayer this week, and not once did we feel that any CPU provided an advantage or disadvantage to our gameplay experience. Whether the CPU was running at stock settings, overclocked, or if it was AMD FX-8150 or Intel Core i7 2500K or 2600K, they all let us play BF3 with the same performance and image quality. We need to note some things about BF3 however, we do know that the Beta does not include all the features that the full version game will. BF3 is supposed to utilize DX11 driver multithreading, but it may not be implemented in the Beta version. At the time of testing the max server size was also only 32 player, we have not tested this on a 64 player server. It is entirely possible the full version game will behave differently, but we just don't know yet.

When it comes to F1 2011 we also experience absolutely no differences in gameplay experience. CPU frequency did not affect performance, nor did the number of cores. F1 2011 experiences running on the AMD FX-8150, Intel Core i7 2500K, or 2600K were indistinguishable."

Sounds good to me, I care more about gaming/real world programs then synthetic benchmarks that Intel win always because of memory bandwidth or whatever.

[notuptome2004]

There is some Reviews that show that AMDs BD is in the same performance gaming wise and few other benchmarks to that of the core i5 and i7 SB chips

http://www.overclockers.com/amd-fx-8150-bulldozer-processor-review

http://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/zardon/amd-fx-8150-black-edition-8-core-review-with-gigabyte-990fxa-ud7/22/

From the Overlclokers review

This CPU is a mixed bag, start to finish. Like I said, AMD reinvented the wheel and took a big chance. It took years to get to this point. Their engineers poured blood, sweat and tears into this architecture. It wins in some places and loses in others. Overall, it’s an improvement from their previous Stars-core derived Thuban. In a few places it falls short, but where it counts for most people – real-world applications like rendering, compression and encoding – it’s a strong step forward, competing perfectly in the market segment where AMD’s pricing is positioning it – against the i5 2500K.

Which is really the rub with many-an-enthusiast. Bulldozer has been talked about for a long time. The way a lot of people at overclocking forums talk about it, you’d think it was supposed to be the second coming. It has been argued about, hotly debated and speculated upon forever. Our own Bulldozer Rumors thread has been going strong since January 14 of this year. It is definitely not the Intel-toppler many thought / wished / hoped / begged it would be. Was I a bit disappointed? Absolutely. I bought into the hype just like many of you and AMD did not produce what a lot of people thought was going to be the return of top-of-the-hill FX.

That, of course, brings us to AMD’s tried-and-true formula: Price-for-Performance. It’s not priced to topple Intel’s higher-end mainstream i7 2600K. At $314.99 shipped, that chip still remains the mainstream enthusiast king-of-the-hill. Every single consumer Bulldozer FX chip will be an unlocked CPU priced at or below $245. Considering the gains seen against the i5 2500K, it’s worth the $25 difference in price.

With all of that said, the overclocker in me is just screaming so what if it just competes with the i5 2500K and doesn’t topple the i7 2600K?! It clocks like a madman. It does its job at the right price for the performance it offers. So, because we try to review based on what a product is relative to what it offers at its price point – and not based on what people with nothing but hopes and dreams expected and/or hoped it would be – it’s safe to call Bulldozer another solid offering from AMD.