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

[technogiant]

^ but FX 8150 has 4 double width fpu units, even if they are shared there are still four of them same as 2500k and they are all double width?????

 

[Guest]

OK so i have to say im a little disappointing, but also intrigued, it's not like FX got it's ass handed to it in every single bench, in some benches it did some serious damage, the damn thing seems all over the place which seems odd, if it's a failure it should have failed generally all round, i expect it to place within 20-30% of a band for all the benches but the damn thing place top in some and bottom in others (and in more then one occasion)

also it fared alot better then i thought in some productivity benches, thats just crazy, makes it hard to understand what this chip is really capable of, im just wondering if there are some issues with AM3+ or software compatibility issues

im in no hurry for a chip upgrade so i just sit and watch how this matures, somethings tells me a win7 update in the not so distant future may make things a bit more entertaining

 

[Guest]

VERY DISSAPOINTED !!

 

[peterheadno1]

Hitler finds out about the AMD Bulldozer benchmarks.





http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SArxcnpXStE

 

[youssef 2010]

The main bottleneck of AMD's previous design is multi-card gaming performance, as demonstrated in one of your past $2000 builds, so we need to put that to the test before giving a fair judgement to the new architecture's gaming performance

 

[airgreek]

I am not shocked at the least bit. First hint for me was the lack of CPUs sent out or an early review, I mean the FX8150 was kept top secret so I knew something was wrong. Next hint was the resignation of top executives at AMD.

 

[youssef 2010]

This is from a personal experience, so don't rate me bad for it. The most CPU bottlenecked game I came across was Dragon Age: Origins. I switched my GPU from 4870 to 6970 and still the same performance is observed. I think you should try that game in you CPU reviews

 

[rohitbaran]

Disappointing. They delayed their production so long for this? Common AMD, give us something that can compete with Intel. I like you, but that is all I can do unless you give something good for my money.

 

[dgingeri]

I have to say I'm really disappointed with this. I'm keeping my i7-920@4.2 for a while longer. It's just not worth the cost of upgrading right now. Perhaps an Ivy Bridge version of the Sandy Bridge-E would encourage me to upgrade, but right now, it just isn't there.

 

[Onus]

I'm disappointed. In some ways, this is rather what I expected, but scaled a little down from what I hoped. Bulldozer offers remarkable improvements in certain work loads, but apparently not the ones of greatest interest to gamers (and many other Tom's readers); I'm going to say I called this one in a recent post based on how the architecture looked to my semi-educated eyes, but I'm not happy about it at all. With the improvements in memory bandwidth, I'd be interested to see how Crossfire / SLI will perform on a 900-series chipset mobo compared to prior generations, but I don't think AMD fanboys should hope for [much] vindication. It's a step forward in some areas, and may bode well for the future, but is a letdown today. At current prices, I don't feel compelled to upgrade from my 970BE.
I am almost irritated at the essentially insignificant improvement in power use, though I'll withhold final judgement until multiple mobos are tested in a roundup, to see if some are notably better than others.
This is not to say I regret choosing AMD in my recent primary build; my choices were heavily influenced by the 990FX chipset's features and connectivity options, and I'd like to think I'd do it the same way, but I was rather hoping for a performance jump out of Bulldozer.

 

[technogiant]

^ thats what I'm going to do, get the cheapest x79 board I can and a cheaper SNB-E 4 core version and oc it.....then once Haswell-E releases I should beable to pick up a higher end final stepping Ivy-E for a bit cheaper.

 

[Partizan92]

I'm afraid that they build their own Pentium 4 (one foot in the grave)

 

[Guest]

Performance seems quite hit-or-miss.
Some benchmarks in other reviews actually show very good performance in some games (e.g. Metro 2033), comparable to, or even better than an 2600k.
Strange. Make of it what you want, but this looks like a very strange chip.

I guess we will have to wait a while to draw any final conclusions.

 

[jgutz2006]

its not all rainbows and a bucket full of kittens but i'll still be purchasing one of these

 

[Reynod]

It performs more like a quad core ... basically.

Chris, thanks for the comprehensive article.

Would you mind doing a bit of a performance comparision on the whole range and give us some feedback on which is the best bang for your buck ... as there are heaps of AM3+ people out there who are probably keen to see what BD CPU to go for?

Can you couch that in terms of OC and non-OC too?

Cheers ... now you probably need some sleep after the last week benching and trying to work out the weird results you have been getting.

Good work.

 

[vigilante212]

Not impressed, would have thought an 8 core to do better at Rendering projects. Anyone who was looking at this for gaming is just stupid since no game utilizes anything over 4 cores atm.

 

[nbraybrook]

This is TERRIBLE! Honestly WTF has AMD been doing all these years?! To little to LATE! 10-15% performance gain a year?! So wtf in 4 years it will be as good as my 2 year old i7 920?! SERIOUSLY AMD WTF?!

 

[billybobser]

wouldn't it be ironic if intel rose their 2500k price in line with the fx8150.

a slap in the face for waiting for AMD, compounding the fail that this is.

If BD isn't going to work in todays tasks, but work in tomorrows, then surely everyone is going to wait for piledriver.

Meaning, why did they not just do a die shrink of the current phenoms along with development of piledriver. Offering value and improved power consumption, maintaining the littlest bit of the market.

 

[DigitalKilla_FL]

I think its safe to say that I won't be upgrading to from my Phenom X4 to Bulldozer. I will keep my current system until Windows 8 is released and upgrade to whatever is fastest (probably Intel) at the time.

I would stick be cranking my Q6600 if it would only overclock more.....lol. That was a great CPU.

 

[Guest]

Huge disappointment. Stacking 8 pieces of crap together instead of four. Wrong approach. They need to improve their single core architecture.

 

[Guest]

This reminds me of the AMD of the pre-Athlon days. If you want performance, buy Intel, if you want cheap, buy AMD. Reminds me of the K5 and K6 processors. They were okay, I owned a K6 machine, but just didn't keep up with the engineering of Intel.

 

[zankuto]

AMD just released a retail Phenom II x4 960T. 95w draw, turbo core. core unlock into an X6 all for 124.99. as far as I'm concerned the 960T Keeps AMD in the game in the lower end.

 

[Yargnit]

This is just... Bad.

Even for the pessimistic out there, I don't think anyone could have fathomed worse per-core performance than the Phenom 2. How is that even possible? At that point wouldn't a smart executive have written off Bulldozer as a failed attempt, and released a die-shrunk P2 x4/x6/x8 with a tweaked turbo core that clocks up above 4.5 @stock in light threading? The R&D would have been exponentially less, and they'd have almost universally better performance than Bulldozer.

The only real hope here is how does it do in heavy multitasking. I'm talking 4+ boxing MMO's, gaming while transcoding video, stuff like that. If I can livestream games while transcoding HD video with a YouTube walkthrough playing on the other monitor then there is at least limited potential. Otherwise it's beat by either the 2500k/2600k or P2 x6 in basically everything. And the P2 x6 sells for $100 less.

 

[upgrade_1977]

[citation][nom]gmcizzle[/nom]What I learned: the 2.5 year old i7-920 is still a beast.[/citation]
LOL, exactly, bought mine over 3 years ago, and 920's still bringing the hammer down. Like the old batman t.v. show, bam!! Pow!! Kaboom!!
Poor amd.. FX = Fully eXagerated, lol. Highest overclock in the world though. 0_o
To bad Ghz doesn't = real world performance.

Don't get me wrong though, decent chip for the price.

 

[mattjargon]

core i5 2500k here i come. will be my first intel cpu as i've been using amd since 1999!