AMD Bulldozer / FX-8150 Desktop Performance Review @ [H]ardOCP

The thing you guys are all forgetting these babies are 8 core CPUs, when software start to take advantage of all 8 cores where does that leave intel
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And Intel will just blissfully sit still while software is slowly developed to take advantage of more cores? Ask the Folding@Home crowd, including me, which multi-core processors - HT, real, modular, 4/6/8 - are the high producers. Intel is already there.

No, I do not want to derail the thread over distributed computing, but one of the few REAL WORLD applications that uses multi-core processors to the hilt, Folding@Home, is Intel dominated at the consumer level. And we Folders will upgrade with any brand, as long as it gets results.

To be fair, Folding results with Bulldozer are yet to be seen, but after the disaster after disaster revealed at review after review, I'm not holding my breath for Zambezi WRT multi-core processing, especially given the horrendous power consumption at full load, overclocked.
 
wolfman3k5 said:
If you look at the architecture closely you will see that they are just a damn Quad Core with an extra Integer Unit per core. The problem is that the Phenom II core used to have 3 ALUs and 3 Address units per core, while Bulldozer has 2 ALUs and 2 Address units per Integer core. Basically it will be 33% slower for single threaded tasks than the Phenom II. Couple with that the huge sub 2 billion transistor count and the poor 32nm yields, and this CPU is an Epic Fail.
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Can't really argue there...:p
 
AlexStenka said:
Can't really argue there...:p
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It makes me wonder if they wouldn't have been better off if they would have just added another ALU and Address unit to each Phenom II core, and added 2 extra cores, and a die shrink. Probably they would have been faster. Just my 2 cents.
 
spacing guild said:
Reminds me of the nVidia FX series. Pure suckage.
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How true.

Forceman said:
I wonder if JF-AMD will update his Bulldozer pre-release FAQ? His frustration appears...misplaced, especially since pretty much all the leaked benchmarks were spot-on. His weaseling on the IPC issue makes a lot of sense now, though.
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IPC doesn't matter! ....indeed...where is informal to explain us how BD will beat THuban by 33-50% and SB by 20%..;)


-Dragon- said:
I got called a intel fanboy/troll/shill a few times for recommending amd fans be a little more cautious with their optimism, but I was really hoping for at least only slightly worse single threaded and noticeably better multi threaded performance, and maybe a price drop on the sandybridge line shortly after BD launch... that would have been a win for everybody IMO.
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Tell me about it...:eek:
But this... everybody just loses with this. There's no reason to price drop existing chips, the i7-2700 will probably come out at a higher price point since it can, and there's no reason not to, and also no reason to rush IB to market, which means they probably get to sit around for a few weeks clearing old SB stock with their thumbs up OUR butts.
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Intel will drop its prices with 2700k. I'd expect the 2500k to be EOL and 2600k to take its place while the 2700k will replace the 2600k.
Intel cannot go higher with the 2700k since it will run over the 4 core SB-E.

Btw, I expect the 4 core SB-Es to really mock across the line the FX.

AlexStenka said:
The thing you guys are all forgetting these babies are 8 core CPUs, when software start to take advantage of all 8 cores where does that leave intel?
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When software takes advantage of all 8 cores, Intel will be happy since it means all of SB's 8 threads will be put to use. Intel is already there.
if your a gamer I think your better of getting a bulldozer, since there is no gains going with SB when it comes to gaming alone. When games start to use 8 cores youll be happy to have a bulldozer, but by then Intel will be at it again with something new...I never build and Intel rig and don't know if I should now. Looks like I'll be keeping my 1090T oced to 3.8ghz NB to 2.8ghz. No reason to upgrade now...AMD needs to get their act together, I do agree with that. But I still love you AMD, you make good stuff and made me really happy over the years, even though your loosing the battle right now. Only think keeping me away from SB is that AMD chips are 8 cores, and since they been making them the past 4 years, they will prob be around for a while before anything new comes out from AMD. In that vid I watched when they were overclocking to 8ghz, I was laughing cuz it looks like AMD is tryin to make up for lack of performance with high frequency overclocks lol. I also think another reason for high power consumption is 8 cores, but its a lil nuts 500+ watts is half of my PSU. If they drop the price on these babies by like 80 bucks then they will be worth it.
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Considering that the dual core I3 2105 seems to be the best gaming CPU, BD will be mostly key chains by the time games will fully take advantage of 8 cores. 2-3 years from now, who will give a f**k about today's BD ?
 
With a launch failure this epic AMD needs to just have a Bulldozer firesale and slash the price of the 8150 to $150.
 
Damn. There is now 1 less AMD fanboy. I was hoping this would be the 2nd comming of the Athlon, but its actually slower then the previous gen clock-for-clock. Sad day for AMD fans, very sad day. Another 4-5 years till the next generation of craptastic CPU's? Cant wait. :rolleyes:

Well at least they are cheep, but that dont hold much water anymore.
 
I thought AMD suppose to be much cheaper and now clock per clock it is slower than previous x4 x6? wow
 
I was hoping AMD would put on a better show. We need the competition to keep prices down. I have no loyalty to either - I go with the best bang for the buck. I've switched a few times over the years. Looks like it's going to be intel chips twice in a row now.
 
Accidentally posted this earlier in the wrong thread, my thoughts:

Single thread performance of BD is worse then I expected. In threaded apps it holds its own against the 2500K, and in some cases even the 2600K. I think it's important, even if sort of under whelming, that Bulldozer is out the door. It's the stepping stone for things to come just like Llano and Zacate were.

It seems that some of the changes they made were for the better but haven't been fully realized yet. Anand has a good piece in his article about just what changes were made and it seems like a lot of this is future proofing. I feel BD+ will get better overtime as apps "grow" into the architecture.

They could of made a 32nm Phenom 2 X8 and probably have seen better performance but this was probably a necessary evil, this new architecture has room to grow. A building block if you will. I don't think there would of been really anyway to improve Deneb much further except for shrinking and adding cores where as now we've got room to grow and scheduled IPC increases moving up the roadmap.

[H]'s gaming numbers seem pretty good so I'm interested to see what's going to happen at Eyefinity Res's with 2/3/4 multi-gpu setups.

AMD in my opinion also has some positive's going for it in the platform department. You can pick-up a 990FX with the ability to run 2/3 way crossfire/sli and 16x/16x for ~$200. If you want something that will do true 16x/16x with Z68 you need to have a board with NF200 and they are all $250-300+. SB-E is coming out but the only way to get an unlocked variant is to spend $600 on the 6c/12t model. When it is all said and done and all these kinks are worked as a whole Bulldozer can end up being a good investment for the $$.

This is a new architecture for AMD, and it's partners. I think we'll see some improvements with the current die after a few bios and software updates.

I think it was crazy for anyone to think that BD would trump SNB in IPC. It's not the holy grail people were expecting but it's certainly not a failure.
 
The current pricing for the performance is way too high.
AMD has to slash them down. I'm a bit AMD fan but no way I'm gonna buy a Bulldozer over a 2500k. Maybe the 4 core version is a good bang for the buck hm,
 
when its getting matched and even beat at times by previous gen cpu with less cores and lower clocks, it most certainly is a failure. give a decent overclock and the already high power consumption goes through the roof too.
 
What the hell AMD? I postponed my SB purchase for 5 months... for THIS!? Single thread performance is just abysmal, by quick glance its not that much better than my old OCd Q9550 for petes sake! It is better but not by large margin. Absolutely nono for emulation users. And even multithreaded performance is bad, except for few random benches and couple of games that makes use of its unorthodox design. But then its just barely on par with SB. And that powerdraw... OMG!

I didnt have any high hopes of Bulldozer totaling SB, but atleast I hoped for CPU that would have been close enough of 2500k, for better price and advantage of more cores/threads if need arises. But what was delivered is... just embarrasing.


*edit* Actually I just ran Cinebench singlethread bench and got a score of 1.06. Better score with 3.45ghz Q9550 than 4ghz FX-8150. And I was browsing while bench was cooking up in the background. *sigh*
 
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from hardware-canucks
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savantu said:
When software takes advantage of all 8 cores, Intel will be happy since it means all of SB's 8 threads will be put to use. Intel is already there.
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By the time mainstream software needs 8 cores (if it ever does), Intel will be rocking Ivy Bridge with 8 real cores.
 
savantu said:
Considering that the dual core I3 2105 seems to be the best gaming CPU, BD will be mostly key chains by the time games will fully take advantage of 8 cores. 2-3 years from now, who will give a f**k about today's BD ?
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Considering that you still don't have a clue that the Bulldozer is a server part foremost. There still some benchmarks which prove that the Bulldozer isn't all bad as some of you deem it to be. The strung out black and white comparison of it not owning at every benchmark so it sucks is clearly your problem.

AMD problem is the high expectations on this cpu but then again find companies that will say before launch sorry guys this is not our best work.

In the end bashing the crap out of the product and "I told you so" is rather childish, Phenom II did very well compared to Phenom I. next year new hardware that will be faster and improved it has been like this for decades dwelling on this one is a waste of time.
 
haha AMD are pathetic. i am dissapointed in them acually. i want COMPETITION. and thats coming from a intel fan as well.

Rubbish. complete farce AMD are. it took them THIS long to bring out this new architecture and it STILL is barely any better then my i7 920 i bought almost 3 years ago!
 
AlexStenka said:
The thing you guys are all forgetting these babies are 8 core CPUs, when software start to take advantage of all 8 cores where does that leave intel?
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Did you even READ the articles and LOOK at the benchmarks? They tested lots of software that takes advantage of all 8 cores and even then the best AMD's so called "real" cores could muster was keeping up with intel's 4. Having double the "real" cores your competition has doesn't matter one bit when each core is only capable of half the real work.

Lets face it, AMD gave us a bunch of bull, and did a lot of dozin, but they sure aren't doing much bulldozing.
 
Pieter3dnow said:
Considering that you still don't have a clue that the Bulldozer is a server part foremost. There still some benchmarks which prove that the Bulldozer isn't all bad as some of you deem it to be.
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One major problem is that a server targeted, high throughput design like BD actually has no better, and arguably less throughput than a desktop oriented processor with half the cores, half the transistors and that uses far less power. It's lack of throughput means it's not going to be particularly good in most server applications and 16 core Interlagos will be in tough against 6 core SB-Es, let alone 8 core versions.

The strung out black and white comparison of it not owning at every benchmark so it sucks is clearly your problem.
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Does it even "own" in a single non-synthetic benchmark?
 
AMD should dump their CPU division and just stick to making video cards. It's all they're really good at these days.
 
Pieter3dnow said:
Bulldozer is a server part foremost.
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unfortunately that is bullshit. efficiency matters most in servers. bulldozer uses more power for less performance than intel. bulldozer efficiency is worst in class. zambezi is dead on arrival, period.
 
bAMtan2 said:
unfortunately that is bullshit. efficiency matters most in servers. bulldozer uses more power for less performance than intel. bulldozer efficiency is worst in class. zambezi is dead on arrival, period.
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You do know that the desktop part differs from server ?
You seen reviews of the server part then ?
 
jonneymendoza said:
haha AMD are pathetic. i am dissapointed in them acually. i want COMPETITION. and thats coming from a intel fan as well.

Rubbish. complete farce AMD are. it took them THIS long to bring out this new architecture and it STILL is barely any better then my i7 920 i bought almost 3 years ago!
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taking out the synthetic benchmarks Kyle did in the article there are 11 benchmarks done .

in 6 of the benchmarks its either between the i7 2600k and i7 2500 k or beats both .

In 5 benchmarks its slower


in x264 pass 2 at stock speeds it gets 37.12 the 2500k @4.8ghz (which is 1ghz faster ) only gets 39.43 . The only chip faster is the i7 990x .


I must be reading diffrent benchmarks than everyone here.

I of course agree the power usage is to high . But that is something that can be fixed.
 
Wow, that's a step backwards in load power use. Price and performance aren't too bad, will have to keep an eye on the quad core (dual module) ones compared to the i3-2100, maybe with some overclocking those will do alright.
 
Oh dear, looks like it's lose/lose for the enthusiast again, some competition this round would have been nice. Having said that I'm still using a Q9450 @ 3.6Ghz and can't find any reason to upgrade yet, so I'm just going to wait until IB next year.
 
eastmen said:
so why did everyone test ddr 3 1600 instead of ddr 3 1833 ?
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Not everyone did. BMR tested at the fastest officially supported speeds for each processor ( 1333MHz for Sandy Bridge and 1866MHz for Bulldozer). It didn't make a significant difference. Bulldozer has abysmal memory read and write speeds and latency compared to Sandy Bridge even when Bulldozer is allowed to run faster RAM .
 
Pieter3dnow said:
AMD problem is the high expectations on this cpu...
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Well, to be fair, it was AMD that provided most of the high expectations - maybe not in the past few months when they realized it was going to flop, but last year and the year before, when they were talking about how this was going to change computing and yada yada yada,,,
 
PrincessFrosty said:
Oh dear, looks like it's lose/lose for the enthusiast again, some competition this round would have been nice.
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Indeed. Because 2500k prices are increasing fast. Just month or two ago you could get one for 180€, give or take. Now its hard to find one under 200€. Around here in Finland anyway. Perhaps I should look overseas...

This is just great. I should have upgraded when they were really really cheap.

*edit* I guess I will wait for IvyBridge instead. If there is some kind of performance/value king similar to 2500k I will take one immidietly, no waiting for bullshit CPUs.
 
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malih said:
I suppose I'll keep my Athlon system until Ivy Bridge and maybe new line of GPU comes out
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That is my conclusion as well. Been impatient for a while now, and was actually starting to think building a budget Bulldozer rig might be an option, that idea has most definitely died with this. Back to waiting for Ivy Bridge.

Very informative reviews, thanks!
 
Here is an alternative take from a light gamer, but more of a Linux user...

I have an 890FX AM3 (not+) and I'm in no hurry to upgrade with these reviews (I run stock as well.....shoot me :) ). I still have to check if my board manufacturer is going to release a new bios. In any case I see a few positives:

* Hopefully this will cause a firesale of the "old" Thuban X6's. I'd love to get a 1090T for $99. This would be a great upgrade for a few other AM3 boards I have.

* New AES instructions for existing AM3(+) Users -- Linux kernel (I primarly run Linux 95% of the time and game on windows maybe 2 hours/week) hopefully implements support for these. I'd love to have hardware accelerated dm-crypt on the desktop. IMHO this would make it worth upgrading my 1090T, but until I see it tested & working, I'm holding out.

* What intel doesn't have: Overclocking + iommu (aka vt-d in intel world). Intel doesn't currently have a whole bunch of choices for overclocking + vt-d. AMD now has a pretty good choice of boards that support IOMMU (990FX, 890FX, SR5670/90...) while intel has.....Z68 ? Maybe? Some of the old Q series? Not a whole lot of choices.

At just over $100 ($130?) For the lowest end quad, I'd recommend this over an i3-2100 for desktop users if they want to run an encrypted system with truecrypt (windows) or dm-crypt (linux).

In any case, that is my alternative take. I'm still hoping to find linux kernel compile benchmarks vs 2500 and 2600 as well as virtualization (kvm/xen) benchmarks vs 2500/2600/thuban (most of my home studying/infrastrutcure is on kvm/AMD 965...)
 
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Both Hardwareheaven and Rage3D have given BD fairly good reviews, former even gave it a performance award. (LOLWUT?)

http://www.hardwareheaven.com/revie...sor-vs-core-i7-2600k-review-introduction.html

http://www.rage3d.com/reviews/cpu/amd_fx_8150/index.php?p=1


I feel BD is going to split people quite a bit, depending what reviews they read and what benches have been used. It seems like that in those rare (at the moment that is) scenarios BD architecture works well, it works really well, close to SB even. Rest however bombs [H]ard... Unfortunately where it bombs, mostly raw single-thread power, is what matters to me.
 
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