Official AMD FX Bulldozer review thread!

[AthlonXP1800]

Originally Posted by jcrox

Do these reviews include the patch for the L2 cache bug?

I'm pulling the trigger on a new SB rig as my start up business can't afford to wait any longer for more computers but... I'm going to be really pissed off if 2 months from now some patch is released and these things turn into processing beasts.

Originally Posted by Peoples-Agent

That always happens with AMD as of late. It's "wait for this / that bios update / fix to sort out the problems" and it just never happens.

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news....aspx?pageid=0

It will never happen after I read the article from AMD insider about what went wrong with Bulldozer during in the last 5 years. Everything was great with old days of Athlon, Athlon XP, Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 X2 until AMD screwed up resources after bought ATI and lost billions then fired thousands of high skillful hardware engineers, software engineers and scientists worldwide. Thousands of talent people had now gone to worked for Apple, Intel, Freescale, Qualcomm, Samsung, Nvidia and others.

Now AMD as much smaller company are no longer have the resources to fix CPU bugs by write new microcode to corrected because they dont have money and people to fix it fast caused delays and no longer have ability to design new microarchitecture to matched Athlon 64 success in old day, what AMD need is billions investing in people, tools and technologies engineers and scientists needed which Intel is doing already invested billions from profits on Atom, Nehalem, Westmere, Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell, Broadwell, Skylake, Skymont, aggressive improving technologies and shrink manufacturing processes down to 10nm.

What happened with AMD management, marketing and R&D is exactly mirrored what happened with Commodore International, AMD's marketing efforts for the Bulldozer were less competitive and seemed half-hearted and unfocused. It time to forget AMD and move on to Intel, AMD will never regain performance crown as Athlon 64 once did.

[nekrosoft13]

Originally Posted by Rollo

Employee 1: Nope, but what's weird is they didn't catch up to what THEY were doing last year! What the f***?! If we tried that they'd probably audit our timesheets for the past three years!

true, core for core, clock for clock bulldozer is a joke

they did pick a right name for it, bulldozers are slow.

[Rollo]

ATIC thanks Hector for the Foundry and contract to build Bulldozers:

http://www.grapheine.com/bombaytv/pu...5af16390b.html

[nekrosoft13]

Originally Posted by slaWter

The first shops in Europe are already increasing the prices of the current i5/i7 line up
Curious to see if we'll see this effect of Bulldozer on the official Intel price lists as well. Those lists will get updated very soon anyway.

Maybe it is time to upgrade my htpc to i3. Before price goes up

[ViN86]

Originally Posted by Viral

There might be some silver linings here,

http://www.hardwareheaven.com/review...evolution.html

They tested with DDR3 1866MHz which is the max supported RAM speed for BD and under settings people actually game at the 8150 came out slightly better in all (3) games tested. H also reported the 8150 to be better than the 2600k for BF3 Beta.

Maybe faster memory is needed? And maybe we should be looking at actual settings people use. There could be some bottleneck that is making the results at low res a lot worse.

Actually the 8150 seems to hold its own pretty well against the 2600K in those tests.

They obtained an OC of 5.2GHz. I'm interested to see how it performs versus the 2600K at those speeds.

[Peoples-Agent]

Out of all of the reviews, their one painted a very different picture. Funny much?

[ViN86]

Originally Posted by Peoples-Agent

Out of all of the reviews, their one painted a very different picture. Funny much?

There were some differences in setups, though, right?

Also, yes it does seem like they hand picked tests where it is comparable.

[Rollo]

Originally Posted by Peoples-Agent

Out of all of the reviews, their one painted a very different picture. Funny much?

Long ago that site was totally in league with ATi, in the days of Zardon. Did things like blow up or burn their NVIDIA review cards.

These days I actually like their reviews and haven't noticed any bias one way or another. For GPUs they're one of few sites that regularly tests apples to apples Surround.

If anything I'd say they're more than fair as they run a standard 4XAA at their 57X10 rather than seeking out the rare game where "Golly Gee! If you have more the 1.5GB VRAM you can run this game at some unplayable framerates at 8X AA!" like some other sites I've seen.

An 8150 may be the equivalent of a 2600K at some games at a decent res with AA and a single GPU, but it wouldn't be my choice for gaming.

[Viral]

I'm not saying it's magically a good CPU, the performance is far too inconsistent and when it does win, it isn't by enough to make up for the losses and higher power consumption. But there is potential there.

There are big problems with the L1 and L2 cache, so if they CAN fix that, whether with BIOS or OS tweaks or in the next core revision (next year), the technology could become competitive. I just think people down right writing the whole architecture off as if it will never be viable are being a bit harsh. I really hope AMD can come back from this, the worst part is that they've tainted the FX name now. So even if they come back, the name itself has a bad stigma around enthusiasts. AMD marketing was better when it was non-existent. Now they just spew a lot of crap with cool sounding names and blanket statements about "gaming products". Go back to focusing on the hardware...

[K007]

wasn't there a fx series from nvidia?....the vacuum cleaner?

[Rollo]

Originally Posted by Viral

I'm not saying it's magically a good CPU, the performance is far too inconsistent and when it does win, it isn't by enough to make up for the losses and higher power consumption. But there is potential there.

There are big problems with the L1 and L2 cache, so if they CAN fix that, whether with BIOS or OS tweaks or in the next core revision (next year), the technology could become competitive. I just think people down right writing the whole architecture off as if it will never be viable are being a bit harsh. I really hope AMD can come back from this, the worst part is that they've tainted the FX name now. So even if they come back, the name itself has a bad stigma around enthusiasts. AMD marketing was better when it was non-existent. Now they just spew a lot of crap with cool sounding names and blanket statements about "gaming products". Go back to focusing on the hardware...

Money can't buy love Viral, but it can buy engineers and better equipment and support staff for them to work with.

If you were the best CPU engineer in the country, would you work at the company with 82% of the market or 18% of the market?

http://www.tgdaily.com/hardware-feat...s-market-share

Going to look for the big salary at the company worth $122B or the company worth $3B?

I think that is AMD's problem- they've lost a lot of their engineers to more successful companies and they don't attract the talent due to things like being on "most likely to go bankrupt" lists recently.

It sort of makes sense. If Bill Gates and Lindsey Lohan got drunk and made a bet each could start a company and build the better CPU, who do you think would win at the end of five years?

That's what we're seeing here.

[Dazz]

As i have posted in the HardOCP form i think is best suited.

This mess is everyone’s fault lol, When you think of the 8150 as a 4 core/module it looks much better. It should be a 4 core 8 threaded design like what the 2600K is. As the FX has parts that can technically make it a core and people believed it as a core, however as it shares resources with each other and hyper treading does not as it shares the work load over the cores rather than resources.

This made AMD think well more is better and named it 8 core to outdo their competitors. After all originally AMD was going to call it a 4 module part. However this confused customers in thinking “what’s the difference from a core and a module”? Although the modules can give upto 80% extra performance it also means that all the cores are loaded as 80% performance, so efficiency has dropped, hence it acts more like a 6 Core CPU up from a Quad core but still lower than a real 8 core which it does in benchmarks.

It’s Microsoft fault as after all this time with the likes of hyper treading been around for so many years applications typically can’t tell a difference from a physical core and a logical unit. This is why a 2600K under very heavy single treads loose performance as it may assign two treads to one core and hence loose performance while the others are idle. With the high performance of the cores it won’t actually saturate the CPU in games which is mostly GPU limited. Technically the CPU scheduler should have really been out years ago in Windows Vista.

Sadly it’s AMD way is it not? To forward think too much they bring the hardware out then have to wait for software developers to catch up. They did this with their Graphics cards on quite a few occasions and this is another one but for the CPU.

When you think about it, it is a leap forward and gives the opportunity for software developers to work with it but when it does become more stream line their competitor will jump on the bandwagon and don’t need to worry about these problems.

As now everyone thinks it’s a 8 core their expectations are off. If you consider it as a Quad core with 8 treads does it look so bad?