Needless to say I am, as most everyone else, disappointed by the performance of Bulldozer. I never expected it to fully bridge the IPC gap with Sandy Bridge but I did expect it to shuffle a bit closer, not perform worse than the last generation. There's a very real reason AMD is thoroughly screwed with Bulldozer and it's not (just) the performance... 4-module Bulldozer, 32nm, ~2 billion transistors, 315mm^2. 4-core Sandy Bridge, 32nm, ~1 billion transistors, 216mm^2. Intel is bound to make a killing compared to AMD on the die size alone, then add the fact that Intel own their own foundries and AMD does not. Ouch.
Suddenly, my Phenom, especially overclocked as it is, doesn't seem so slow anymore. Skipping Bulldie, that's what I'll do. 2012 - surprise me!
Test system shoud have used 1866 memory speed as its normal for BD. Not allow mobo to choose it. basically, BD DDR3 lost 4000MB reading speed.. just for my 0 cent.
BD sucks for the most part, but the thing with Sysmark isn't because of BD. If it was all about BD, Nvidia, Via and whoever else left, wouldn't have left. The problem with Sysmark has always been that Sysmark has always catered benchmarks to suit Intel CPU's, from when Intel was behind, and even still when Intel has been ahead.
Yeah, AMD is definitely not in good shape. People are starting to cite their graphics market as doing well, but Intel is starting to chip away there too with their integrated solutions. Nvidia recognized this years ago and started moving towards the mobile/arm market. AMD doesn't have this luxury yet. Not sure what they are going to do, as it seems like they are sticking with this architecture for some time. They claimed they're targeting a 15% increase in performance in their next generation CPU, but Intel is targeting a 20% increase over Sandybridge with Ivy. So the gap is only going to increase further. Not sure what AMD plans on doing, but it better get it's act into gear now.
Or they could delay Ivy Bridge to maximise the return on Sandy Bridge. I would, the market has no viable alternative and won't for at least 18 months now.
Intel should drop their prices, not increase them, as surely dropping would increase sales, more than increasing.
Very true. AMD knocks the price down say 30% then this would be MUCH more interesting. I hope prices fall fast.
It does pretty well in battlefield3 and the beta does not even have full multithreading support so the retail game I would imagine would favour the Fx CPU even more so. I may have to upgrade to the Fx from my x6 as BF3 is the main thing I will be playing. Read! http://m.hardocp.com/article/2011/10/11/amd_bulldozer_fx8150_gameplay_performance_review/
Just read the review over at anandtech, I'm finding it quite interesting the more, and more I read about bulldozer that many of the reviewers basically are saying it wasn't ready, that Windows 7 can't properly use the architecture, and that because of the issues at GF we are not seeing the true performance of the architecture. I just hope that in the future AMD can fix these issues, and produce something that is at least competitive to someone who cares about thing other than raw clock speed and lots of cores. Bring on Piledriver.
Piledriver will be a waste of time as well if its only around 10-15% better than Bully (as being reported). Hmm, Bull*****, PILEdriver, anyone see a theme here
Before you make the jump from X6, read this first : http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/10/11/amd_bulldozer_fx8150_desktop_performance_review/9 Look at the wattage at load. If you pay for your own electricity bill, owning a BD (and OC-ing it) eventually will be more expensive than an i7-2600K; ~170W difference. Keep your X6.
Awsome Review as always Hilbert. Completely useless for Us Gamers , even my old overclocked i7 950 its a lot faster in games , Complete Failure. FAILED By chispy at 2011-10-12
You missed the part where Hilbert says that he had to ramp up the voltage. My point is that they wanted to hit 4.3Ghz without ramping up the voltage that far (obviously) but weren't able to because of the 32nm GF process.
Lol at the Bulldozer pics. I'm sad that it can't even win in multithreaded games like BC2 and BF3. I would pay $150 for the 8150, since it's worse then the 2500k and takes up a heap of power.
I second this, WTF people? why running at 1600 when BD can do 1866? its obvious that their get most of their memory bandwidth by running at that speed, its like saying, Ok, I will review this 2600k but i will put the memory on single chanel and run the memory only at 800. Most bios doesnt even know how to use your memory speed properly, my memories run at bios default 667 when they should be 800.
