Bulldozer Release

[jdeb]

Review from Tom's Hardware and AnandTech

I am a little disappointing in the pricing considering it falls in between Core i5-2500K and Core i7-2600K. Also it is about a year late and the performance differences raise my eyebrows a tad.

AMD FX-8150 Review: From Bulldozer To Zambezi To FX : AMD Sets The Stage For FX

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4955/t...-fx8150-tested

[Sourtop]

I get the impression its a step in the right direction for AMD, but the fact that their new CPU is beat out by current Intel CPUs (and at points even much older) and even AMD's older CPUs at a better price point is pretty disappointing.

Coupling the CPU with a liquid cooler kit is a neat idea though.

[Masaki 7-11]

Finished reading a few reviews as well, looks like for the most part it's marginally faster than a Phenom II x6 in consumer applications, which is very disappointing. Looks like the architecture is quite good for server/workstation use, but it hasn't been tweaked enough to be of value for consumer use where most programs aren't highly threaded.

[Katreat]

I agree. I was really hoping to see AMD hit one out of the park and put some real heat on intel to push the limits.

Kat

[wade7575]

The Reviews were really know supprise to me you would think AMD would have gotten these CPU's out faster and made them faster as well.I don't hate AMD I just can't even be bothered looking at any of there stuff unless I'm looking to build a PC for someone who is just durfing the NET and doing stuff with it that does not need a CPU with Monster Power.

[Masaki 7-11]

Originally Posted by wade7575 The Reviews were really know supprise to me you would think AMD would have gotten these CPU's out faster and made them faster as well.I don't hate AMD I just can't even be bothered looking at any of there stuff unless I'm looking to build a PC for someone who is just durfing the NET and doing stuff with it that does not need a CPU with Monster Power.

For gaming the Phenom IIs are decent processors, especially if you don't have a really high budget. If you've seen any of the benchmarks with Crysis 2, you'll see that the scores with all the processors they were testing with (Sandybridge, Phenom II, Core i7 990X and Bulldozer) were all tied since the game was being bottlenecked by the video card. For the most part most games will be bottlenecked at high settings/resolution by video cards rather than by processor.

If you need monster CPU power for highly multithreaded tasks (or LOTS of single threaded tasks), bulldozer gives sandy bridge a good run for it's money; the main problem with bulldozer is that it's single thread performance isn't very good, so a lot of older code or code that's not multithreaded doesn't properly utilize bulldozer and therefore runs slowly.

[jdeb]

Should be receiving my ASUS Sabertooth 990FX / AMD FX-8150 Friday for a work station build and the companion FireGL V7300 GPU. Looking at improved render times on a budget, should fit the bill. This could be a huge savings for the customer as Masaki pointed out the single threaded issue as compared to the modern applications. The savings will come in a single CPU configuration.

[jdeb]

Delivered the system today and the customer is very happy. It is really a very nice CPU when you have software that takes advantage of it. I played around with the overclocking a little and it really is an overclocking monster if your into that. It is fine out of the box. It is definitely faster ( 25% or more ) than an i5 when it comes to rendering.

[David M]

What does the Bulldozer benchmark at and with which benchmarks? How about with SuperPi?

[jdeb]

Originally Posted by David M What does the Bulldozer benchmark at and with which benchmarks? How about with SuperPi?

I did not do either. I just ran some of his 3D artwork (render files) and seen a significant reduction in time with the bulldozer.

[Nuclear Krusader]

Kudos to AMD for making Intel solutions more attractive.

[David M]

It seems the jury is still out on where Bulldozer is located on the performance/price curve. Is it at, above or below Intel's curve? We need to see some more benchmarking. So far it has not shown itself to be an "Intel killer" like many were predicting.

[jdeb]

Originally Posted by David M It seems the jury is still out on where Bulldozer is located on the performance/price curve. Is it at, above or below Intel's curve? We need to see some more benchmarking. So far it has not shown itself to be an "Intel killer" like many were predicting.

It is not a killer by any means but from a mid-level workstation standpoint it makes sense. I can see people being disappointed with it with general gaming, office applications, and general computing applications, however it is still fast just not overall faster than an i5. It does shine with applications that are CPU intensive for sure and that is where I will be using it. I will use dual Xeon's for high-level workstations but those are few and far between, at least for me.

There are all kind of benchmarks out there but I did not have time to play around as I have been very busy with repairs lately.