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Official Bulldozer Reviews

eddiew said:
I really hope so... Though to be fair, their GPUs are very good already. Hopefully that will prop them up long enough for another attempt in CPU space - maybe this time solving a problem that exists (i.e. the need for good lightly threaded performance) rather than a problem they hope will exist soon(TM).

I can't help wondering if someone at AMD isn't sitting there thinking "But multi threading is the way of the future! The way of the future! The way of the future!" ...




Actually, yes, they ARE on this week only! :D
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Never mind TWO ... this is a bargain! http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-254-AM&groupid=595&catid=686&subcat=


Still got a Barton XP 2500+ Mobile powered PC in my garage (even still have the XPM2400+ that did not clock as high!) .. haven't fired it up for a while though! Also had a couple of thoroughbreds and an opteron 165 ... I actually thought for a while that an 8 core BD would be my next CPU after my 6320, Q6600 & i7 920 ... ah well.
 
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how on Earth has the power consumption ended up like that? all eight cores at normal speeds (also Turbo) at within 125W TDP, so how the hell does it all go to pot if the frequency is taken up like 200MHZ above that, that is nuts?! reading through the reviews the power consumption figures are just damned baffling!

makes me not so unhappy that I have X6 in here, makes you think that regardless of how elegant or clever Bulldozer might have seen, it just hasn't paid off for them, maybe sticking with Phenom II and spending all that time and effort getting more performance out of it and heading over to 32NM with Phenom might have paid off more, at 45NM it was getting pretty decent clock speeds.

not so sure Bulldozer is such an epic failure just yet, well the first release quite clearly hasn't done the business. they need to find out why the hell its sucking up so much power for one, never know might rear its head again sometime in the future, with the actual vision of what they tried to achieve fulfilled, but not today!

another matter, what was the purpose of putting such an insane amount of cache on these dies? people wondering whats taking up all those transistors, its all that bleeding cache! can't believe they are EOL Phenom II, surely they've ran tests and benchmarks between the two and noticed that Phenom still has an edge, was their any reason they couldn't put Phenom II on 32NM, add XOP and AVX to the architecture and add another two cores, taking up the same space or less space than Bulldozer did?
 
Oh dear, I've been rather looking forward to this for a while, I was being, or at least I thought I was being realistic about the likely performance rather than overly optimistic, thus I wasn't actually planning on changing my own cpu since I'm quite happy with my first gen Lynfield I5 at 3.6GHz still. However it would seem that despite being very cautious with my expectations AMD has actually managed to disappoint and not just a bit either but quite a lot. I didn't really expect it to 'bulldoze' Sandybridge ...indeed I was thinking it would probably 'just' about outgun the Lynfield ...but I was expecting it to do so consistently and comprehensively in pretty much any given scenario ...yet what we actually have is a chip that actually gets outgunned by it's predecessor in quite a few situations and under most circumstances outperformed by any Nehalem desktop chip quite handily too.

The single threaded performance is downright inexcusable tbh ...and then heaily threaded performance isn't exactly what was expected either to be frank. Sure it has a couple of new instruction sets and can under certain conditions shine ...but those conditions are fairly ...narrow and thus what we are left with is a cpu that has what I would call, generally lack luster performance ...but with moments of 'good' performance.

I am just left sipping my tea and thinking that AMD is really just trying to put lipstick on a pig here ...sure, from 'certain' angles in 'very' low light ...if you hold your nose and squint it 'might' look like Oliva Wilde ...but at the end of the day, it's still a swine.

I'm also not convinced about the architecture, I'm not a micro-electronics engineer ...but it seems to me that the only way it would really work out would be if AMD had managed to push clock-speeds much, much higher. It's a case of 2 steps forward and 3 steps back in many regards. I'm not saying it's bad, I simply don't have the expertise to really state that but I'm ...unconvinced it's the right approach.

What a shame.
 
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ColonelMustard said:
955 BE is an amazing chip for the price ;)
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It's bloody brilliant for 65 quid! If I didn't have one already, I'd get one today :P

...the irony is for what I do (which is mostly stuff with 1-2 heavy threads), I reckon it's faster than a Bulldozer would be. Poor old AMD, they've totally launched to the wrong market. America might like an 8 litre engine developing 400 horsepower, but this is the UK... we go 4 litres and 500 bhp :P
 
AMD FX "Bulldozer" Review - (4) !exclusive! Excuse for 1-Threaded Perf.

What I'm about to deal with here is comparing 2CU/4C and 4CU/4C Bulldozers.
(CU stands for Compute Unit, or equivalently 'Module')
It can be an excuse for Bulldozer's initial poor single-thread performance:
benchmark tools are just under-optimized for that kind of architecture, but not virtually a 'poor' performance if some optimization is done.

Here's the test scheme: I'm sure that everybody understand what these pics meaning for.
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http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums...ew-(4)-!exclusive!-Excuse-for-1-Threaded-Perf


Ignore the 4CU/8C bar in the graphs as that will just confuse things for some people.

2CU/4C is what the CPU normally drops to under certain single/low thread conditions.

4CU/4C in RED is a user forced condition through the bios that the CPU does not use on its own accord which seems to be better under certain single/low thread conditions.
 
Bleek said:
Thanks for the link, that's pretty interesting and shows a considerable performance difference.
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Reading through the threads gives some good points, if a 12core BD was available and using that technique it may be a worth while upgrade from a phenom hex.
 
Final8y said:
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums...ew-(4)-!exclusive!-Excuse-for-1-Threaded-Perf


Ignore the 4CU/8C bar in the graphs as that will just confuse things for some people.

2CU/4C is what the CPU normally drops to under certain single/low thread conditions.

4CU/4C in RED is a user forced condition through the bios that the CPU does not use on its own accord which seems to be better under certain single/low thread conditions.
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I was reading that yesterday, it's a shame he doesn't provide the power consumption figures to go with it. That's BD's biggest negative IMO.

What I'd like to know is what are these single threaded jobs that we use are PCs for that everyone's getting their knickers in a twist about? I can't think of anything except for games, that don't use more up to date engines that can take advantage of multi-threading properly, and even then they tend to be games that will run at high fps easily anyway. Anything else that is properly CPU intensive that I am likely to do with my cpu will be properly multi-threaded so will surely benefit from BD's design.
 
The Hardwareheaven review is trash.

Totally do not get what they are on about and make a false statement from their GPU bound testing:

"Excellent CPU for games"

The actual statement should be:

"Was able to drive our GPU bound games"

It's not an excellent CPU for games, it's an adequate CPU for current games.

Note to self - Never use Hardware Heaven for reviews.
 
Sin_Chase said:
The Hardwareheaven review is trash.

Totally do not get what they are on about and make a false statement from their GPU bound testing:

"Excellent CPU for games"

The actual statement should be:

"Was able to drive our GPU bound games"

It's not an excellent CPU for games, it's an adequate CPU for current games.

Note to self - Never use Hardware Heaven for reviews.
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Is it possible that motherboard has a tweaked BIOS, I didn't see anyone else using it?

Does seem odd their results are better than most other sites, in fact based on their review I'd have no issue upgrading to a BD. :confused:
 
wolvers said:
I was reading that yesterday, it's a shame he doesn't provide the power consumption figures to go with it. That's BD's biggest negative IMO.

What I'd like to know is what are these single threaded jobs that we use are PCs for that everyone's getting their knickers in a twist about? I can't think of anything except for games, that don't use more up to date engines that can take advantage of multi-threading properly, and even then they tend to be games that will run at high fps easily anyway. Anything else that is properly CPU intensive that I am likely to do with my cpu will be properly multi-threaded so will surely benefit from BD's design.
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One that caught my eye was the Adobe suite, it seems to perform very well on BD so if you work with graphics and design it's not a bad choice at all.
 
Sin_Chase said:
The Hardwareheaven review is trash.

Totally do not get what they are on about and make a false statement from their GPU bound testing:

"Excellent CPU for games"

The actual statement should be:

"Was able to drive our GPU bound games"

It's not an excellent CPU for games, it's an adequate CPU for current games.

Note to self - Never use Hardware Heaven for reviews.
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I haven't read their review but from what you just said, it doesn't exactly chime with Anandtech's review, and their reviews are usually thorough and typically 'right'.

Excellent it is not, adequate, alright, ok, does the job ...it works would be more true ...but excellent, no.
 
Bleek said:
Is it possible that motherboard has a tweaked BIOS, I didn't see anyone else using it?

Does seem odd their results are better than most other sites, in fact based on their review I'd have no issue upgrading to a BD. :confused:
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They used settings which were GPU bound. CPU usage probably did not go above 40-50%. This is not a test which illuminates an "Excellent Gaming CPU"
 
Gerard said:
I feel sorry for that guy having to sell a turd :(
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At 07.30:

Guy on left: "The original FX-51 series processor from AMD: what you guys come up with as an enthusiast level processor for what folks were looking for the best of the best. Fastest available. And the FX series here definitely hails back to that?

AMD guy on right: "Yep. Absolutely. Totally intentional."

\FAIL.
 
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