AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer finally tested

[Piledriver]

Nice to see the drama continues

AMD slides and comments about future products aren't meant for the average joe, they are meant for investors and partners, and to those you always give the best case scenario not the worst, it works that way in every company, the difference is if you deliver or not. Look at Intel, despite being a lot better and greater CPU’s, Nehalem and Sandy weren’t the great leap Intel promised in their slides, i mean Nehalem was supposed to be the most revolutionary CPU in the history of CPU's and is was just core duo without the ancient FSB.
Then you have blogs and sites, that from slides and the cryptic performance comments by AMD, come to the conclusion that a monster is being built, then you have AMD fans waiting for another miracle, K8, the outcome is inevitable. I understand the disappointment, but it's not like it didn't happen before. Barcelona was supposed to destroy Intel, even the lowly AM2 was supposed to smash Intel to oblivion with it''s Reverse-HT. And people are doing it again, from an AMD slide with a cryptic mention to 10% x86 improvement, everyone is already saying piledriver is going to to have 10-15% Better IPC.

The i have to say i found amazing how from straightforwards things like numbers and graphs different people reach different conclusions. I saw 5\6 reviews, my impression was zambezi won the large majority of the tests vs thuban, but when reading the comments on this thread i doubted myself, so i had to double check, and review the reviews I've seen. I stopped at the third, it was pointless to go on, Techreport 20-5, X-bit labs 21-6, TomsHardware 31-10, bringing the total of 72-21 benchmarks in favor of FX-8150, it's not even close. How does that translate to the FX-8150 being 40% slower? or 1100T being quite faster? or a a worse launch than Barcelona for that matter, Phenom 9600 lost the majority of the benchmarks to the X2 6400.

And please let K10 die already, How do people know a 32nm would be better? A K10 in 32nm would have zero issues? Would be able to reach higher frequencies? Let’s say yes for argument sake, what about 2012, 2013, 2014,2015, 2016. Bulldozer is kinda of modular, AMD can cut and paste modules according to the segment, server, desktop, mobile, k10 doesn't allow that. Bulldozer is future proof, K10 isn't, increasing thread count with Bulldozer design it’s a lot easier and doable than K10, and so on and so on… Sorry to say bu AMD makes server cpu's, even the beloved K8 was designed for servers.

However, in determining project goals for Bulldozer single threaded performance was consciously sacrificed to meet what the team determined was a more optimal overall design point.

I read this in mid 2010. Why are people surprised that FX have lower IPC by end of 2011? Specially with a borked stepping.

AMD missed the target clocks, it’s obvious and no benchmark was in fact needed to understand that.

Hint nº1, K10 has a 12 stage pipeline, we don’t know how many stages Bulldozer have, but let’s go with the conservative number of 50% more, putting it one stage longer than Nehalem. So the pipeline increase plus all the tweaks that were made hurting IPC to allow more frequency, plus the smaller node, allows AMD a 300mhz faster CPU?
Hint nº2, faster models are coming Q1 2012
Hint nº3, in less than 6 months AMD won’t be selling these models. They'l be gone faster than the original Phenom's.

The power consumption on the benchmarks was just proof. If AMD was were Intel is there’s no way they would put this stepping on the market, but AMD needs to make money, and like i said AMD focus is servers and it's almost certain that the best bulldozer's are going there.