AMD FX-8150 Review: From Bulldozer To Zambezi To FX

[Guest]

Why does the "FX-8150-based Gamer Ultra FTW PC" only have 1x 6970?
Why go cheap on the GPU Toms?
I know it is a prize, but I would ditch the Blu-Ray burner and pool the cash for a 6990.

 

[pull]

I wonder if they will be able to sell even a single piece :O

 

[Soma42]

I wonder if they will be able to sell even a single piece :O

I can see Bulldozer doing exceedingly well on the server market, but I doubt it will make much of an impact on the consumer side of things.

Dare I speak for the enthusiast market when I say this is not what was expected or wanted after waiting years on end.

 

[joytech22]

Wtf is AMD thinking? Most desktop programs rely heavily on per-clock performance NOT the amount of cores you have.. Are they trying to push developers into developing around their technology or something?

Not all users use their computers for productivity tasks but the ones that do will still be fairly disappointed, those who multitask may also be disappointed.

Per clock performance is where it's at when at the desktop front, Efficiency and power/cores is for servers.

Let's keep it that way.

 

[megamanx00]

Well it's about damn time.

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]Yuka[/nom]Great review as usual, Mr. Chris!Well, then the FX8150 looks more of a sidegrade to the PhII965 @4Ghz than an upgrade, huh...AMD, I AM DISAPPOINT.Oh well, let's wait for Piledriver to be a FXII-8150 or some name like that, lol.What about some OC testing, Mr. Chris? I'm curious as to the FX making up for it's incompetence to beat steadily the 2500k with more Hertz under the hood.Cheers![/citation]

It's in there Overclocking does help to an extent. We're working on a story dedicated to overclocking this processor too, though!

Thanks for reading,
Chris

 

[pull]

I can see Bulldozer doing exceedingly well on the server market, but I doubt it will make much of an impact on the consumer side of things.

Dare I speak for the enthusiast market when I say this is not what was expected or wanted after waiting years on end.

I thought Bulldozer wasn't meant for servers, I thought it was supposed to be an equivalent for the 2600k... hint the stock water cooling kit hell they only made progress over Intel with the primitive side "cooling"... don't get me wrong... I want them to do better so I can buy my Intel cheaper :>

 

[Hellbound]

Sorry to say, but I'm disappointed. I had hoped that AMD would present some real price challenges for Intel. The way I see it, Intel wont have to change a thing.

 

[wunderkinder]

[citation][nom]homeboy2[/nom]Everyone should cry, even the Intel fanboys, this is bad news for everyone, now Intel has absolutely no incentive to lower prices or accelerate Ivy Bridge.[/citation]

I don't think Intel is worried about AMD. It is worried about losing share in the phone and tablet market to qualcomm etc. That is what is driving Intel.

 

[that_aznpride101]

[citation][nom]intersteller[/nom]Man, what a disappointing turn of events. Why bother with the FX branding AMD? I have ♥ AMD for a long time, but I feel that they are simply not a large enough company to compete with Intel, Intel has about 5x the number of employees. THIS IS BAD FOR EVERYONE. Intel has no competition and is 5x larger, sad days. Intel can charge $1,000 for a processor and people will buy it simply b/c there is no competition for processors at that level. I would like to say, that the 4xxx processor looks promising to me, may be worth an upgrade from my 955BE.Another thing to note, WHY does AMD stress the importance of extra cores? We are not at a point where anything is optimized to use these cores, so whats the point. If I were to get an Intel K process, I could disable HT.Man I have been searching the web for BD news and rumors for the last 3 months, and this is what I get? Yes, its an improvement, but not much.[/citation]

I totally understand and agree with you. I've been an AMD fan for the past 7 years, and when I first heard about Bulldozer I got really excited about it. For the past 3 weeks, I've been scouring the latest news and rumors about BD and even dreamed about upgrading my ancient AMD Athlon 2500+ XP desktop (which by the way, the motherboard has officially died as of 2-3 weeks ago). BD was supposed to be my "dream" machine, so imagine my disappointment when I read this review and find out that BD isn't even close to what it was hyped up to be. Now, I'm seriously contemplating about upgrading my Athlon XP to a Phenom instead. -_- I guess the positive thing is, Phenom will be a very cheap upgrade since BD will decrease Phenom prices, I hope.

I'm still an AMD fan, but a very disappointed one. I just hope, AMD, from reading all the comments above this one that you understand you lost a lot of good faith from your fans and perhaps lost some of them to Intel. For your sake, I hope this will be a good lesson for you and give you a sense of urgency to learn to adapt and innovate quickly. Better luck next time.

 

[Mr_x]

Good i trusted my instincts jumped ship and bought i5-2500k just day before yest.......Saved!

 

[Benihana]

Glad I made the switch to Intel with the i7 930 a while back. Seems it's still competing.

 

[megamanx00]

I admit I'm a little disappointed. I knew that IPC would go down in some cases since both threads were sharing 4 partial instruction decoders (compared to 3 complete instruction decoders per core with previous chips going back to the Athlon and 4 in recent Intel chips) but this was just too much. Shame on you AMD. Shame.

 

[Scotty99]

I knew it would play out like this, glad i bought the 2500k 4 months ago at microcenter for 179.00 (and got a biostar p67 for 29.99!)

 

[humble dexter]

So, let’s say someone puts Core i5-2500K and FX-8150 in front of you. The Core i5 costs $220 bucks, and the FX runs $245. Which one do you buy?

An 8 core Bulldozer losing any benchmark to a 4 core Phenom II while costing twice the price is unforgivable, and in this review FX-8150 lost plenty of them.
And all AMD has to say is "it doesn't matter if it's GPU caped" : Well it matters a whole lot to me, when that FX is priced twice as much as that Phenom it's trading blows with.
To answer the question I would ask if I could swap for a Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition and an extra 100$ to spend on the GPU (or SSD)
Unless I was trying to build a server instead of a desktop PC, which I'm not.
FX-8150 is one year too late to be priced above 220$

 

[Soma42]

I thought Bulldozer wasn't meant for servers, I thought it was supposed to be an equivalent for the 2600k... hint the stock water cooling kit hell they only made progress over Intel with the primitive side "cooling"... don't get me wrong... I want them to do better so I can buy my Intel cheaper :>

Bulldozer is the overall architecture. Zambezi is the code-name for the desktop variants and Interlagos and Valencia are the server chips.

Frankly, I'm not sure AMD cares about competing with Intel's high end anymore. IIRC AMD has much more of a reputation and market share of the server end, so I can understand why they would want to maintain that income, but this is a bit of an embarrassment that Bulldozer can barely keep up with the 2.5 year old Nehalem.

 

[dragonsqrrl]

[citation][nom]intersteller[/nom]Intel has no competition and is 5x larger, sad days. Intel can charge $1,000 for a processor and people will buy it simply b/c there is no competition for processors at that level.[/citation]
I feel this is a bit of a distortion of history. I only bring this up because I often hear people making this argument, sometimes even as a way of justifying their AMD buying decisions. But the truth is the $1000 price point existed long before AMD's recent (as in the past 5 years) value oriented marketing.

AMD once dished out $1000 consumer processors on a regular basis, just like Intel. It wasn't Intel that suddenly inflated the prices of high-end consumer processors due to a lack of competition, it was AMD that could no longer compete at these higher price points, leading to the drastic price readjustments following the launch of the Core 2. This was AMD's strategy to remain performance competitive with Intel, and to survive, nothing more.

Despite the absolute lack of competition at the high-end (with perhaps one or two exceptions, the launch of the Phenom II x6 at the $300 price point being one) Intel has still brought significant performance and efficiency improvements over the past five years. And they've done an impressive job sticking to their annual "tick tock" release schedule, despite having little incentive to do so.

Is AMD important for the future of the industry? Absolutely. But despite fanboy sentiment that so often graces Tom's boards and comments, they are not what's driving performance and innovation forward right now, Intel is.

 

[dragonsqrrl]

[citation][nom]Soma42[/nom] but this is a bit of an embarrassment that Bulldozer can barely keep up with the 2.5 year old Nehalem.[/citation]
It'll be 3 years old in about half a month.

 

[di general]

And everybody told me to wait. Glad I didn't

 

[cmcghee358]

Wow. This makes me want to buy a 1100T though right!?

 

[ohim]

First of all i was hoping to see a sunshine on AMD`s side but what a dissapointment

So let me see if i get this right.

The 8 core AMD cpu behaves poor because even though current programs are multicore aware they still don`t know how to take advantage of those extra cores ? That makes me even more sad since we have 64 bit since forever and there are still 32 bit aplications around, multi core since about the same period and we still have problems adapting to it.
On the other hand saw in real life applications that multi core CPUs like ... 2 vs 4 are a tremendous advantage when using multiple programs like Premiere PRO+ Photoshop + After effects + Encore + Adobe media encoder and few more (yeah i get crazy when i start working) Even though the 2 core CPU has about the same raw perfrormance as the 4 core one when working with multiple applications the 4 core one shows tremendous advantages (but hardly benchmark`able since you have to "feel" the PC running smoothly with all those opened and every one of them doing something.

I would really like to know if the guys at Toms could try and recreate the scenario given above (note all programs were doing something at that time not just idle`ing in backround) and compare then the 4 cores i7 vs the 8 cores FX to see if the "feeling" of responsiveness favors the 8 core or still i7 is the king at this also.

And i say again ... totally disappointed about this well at least i get hardware acceleration in opera 12 since i`m an opera fan.

 

[Guest]

As an After Effects user with an AMD motherboard I'm more impressed with the Phenom X6 than anything. Intel's i7/i5 and the AMD FX-8150 were better but not crushingly better in Photoshop, or Premiere, especially when you consider the value of the X6. It's quite the contender as far as content creation is concerned. I know what my next cpu upgrade is gonna be and it's not the FX-8150.

 

[techpops]

This really is shocking, early indications were not looking good but I still had high hopes that for 3D rendering, where all cores were running flat out, Bulldozer would do well. So what a massive shock to see the previous generation 1100T outperform an FX8150 in the 3DS Max benchmark.

I almost want to ask the quesiton. Given a 1100T overclocked on air and an FX8150 overclocked on air, which is faster now? But really, given that you need an expensive 990FX board, there's little point in going for the FX8150's small gains in overclocking when you can save so much more money with a 1090T (seems to overclock the same as a 1100T) with a cheap motherboard and just build more of them for an at home render farm or make do with one and know you have the fastest AMD rendering box for dirt cheap.

I still don't see Intel competing at the 1090T price point if you want to render animation as your main use of a computer. You can pay more and get more performance but not really much more for the big leap in cash.

My next upgrade will be making the cheapest stable 1090T boxes I can and using them to render animation or an Opteron with server motherboard to get at 2 6 core CPU's. I still haven't decided which way to go but 1090T is looking even more attractive now after the launch of the FX processors.

Great review btw. Would love to see Cinebench scores as well

 

[johnson336]

... Sigh. So much for waiting around to upgrade for several months based on a false notion of "more time equals more performance". Perhaps these CPUs are just ahead of their time and will really shine when software learns to utilize all 8 "cores" all the time? When will that happen? Probably not for a long while. Sad.

 

[cangelini]

Thanks techpops.

Re: Cinebench, I pulled it from the suite after my -3960X preview after getting some difficult-to-explain results. I'm happy to run the numbers for you if you'd like, but I'll only have the AMD results (and maybe a comparison to the 1100T if I do a quick CPU swap). Feel free to reach out over Twitter to continue the conversation off the comments section =)

Best,
Chris