AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer finally tested

[Leeghoofd]

We love you Movieman :-)

Plz get a room you two lovebirds :p

[STaRGaZeR]

NO, NO, AND NO! FX is not tragic, as many people want to see it

[Final8ty]

This is a good post: http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=...4&postcount=30

On the server side (where JF-AMD is) it looks good

http://www.cpu-world.com//news_2011/..._revealed.html
http://www.cpu-world.com/news_2011/2...s_sighted.html

[mav2000]

@ Flanker, while I agree the performance is "decent", its no where close to what the marketing slides say. Well, even with that performance I am fine with it. But the power draw is what is now keeping me away.

[AliG]

yeah i'd like to see the actual test where they show 50% more performance for just 33% more cores at the same clockspeed

[Hornet331]

NO, NO, AND NO! FX is not tragic, as many people want to see it . How many from us read most of reviews? How many of us thinking about benchmarks or real aplications? Do u using home every day superpi or excel? Also 3DMark06 or working in Photoshop? Its real some Sysmakr or time in compression/decompression? Its about this! Look at example one of good review (most of them are real aplications). I dont say, FX is great, but still I dont agree with FX is fail.

Well I did, and the review you linked to is nothing special... if anything it lacks some thing others do... the most sophisticated bench suites are on Toms Hardware and HT4u, toms because it test video edeting and compiler performance (which noone des beside hardware.fr) and HT4U especial for various audio encoding apps. I also like Techreport for testing Scientific apps.

And before screaming foul better take a look at this first:

Some of the larger reviewsites compared what they bench

Apps/Synth:


Games:


Combined:

[zalbard]

Dave, if you are reading this, I would certainly recommend a new avatar

Like this one?

[Kondik]

Well I did, and the review you linked to is nothing special... if anything it lacks some thing others do... the most sophisticated bench suites are on Toms Hardware and HT4u, toms because it test video edeting and compiler performance (which noone des beside hardware.fr) and HT4U especial for various audio encoding apps. I also like Techreport for testing Scientific apps.

And before screaming foul better take a look at this first:

Some of the larger reviewsites compared what they bench

Apps/Synth:


Games:


Combined:

Thanks Hornet, good to see a summary in a nice sleek table.

Indeed but nobody here cares, he's one of the 'illogical' redhead club that will see a light in every dark tunnel, and try to tell them is the train that's going to run him over ... nope you don't understand, but you know, when they drown they will try to hold anything to keep them above water. I mean, come on ... 8 "Half Cores" + OC it to get a 'better' performance and suddenly a Power Hog appears, and its Super Effective.

Someone Prove me wrong, atm I, based on all reviews on all available pages, see only a mediocre product that is a good competition to bottom end Nehalem Series.

[RussC]

While it may not be a fail, its not better than last get Thuban. Theres almost no reason to get the BD over Thuban by those charts.

RussC

NO, NO, AND NO! FX is not tragic, as many people want to see it . How many from us read most of reviews? How many of us thinking about benchmarks or real aplications? Do u using home every day superpi or excel? Also 3DMark06 or working in Photoshop? Its real some Sysmakr or time in compression/decompression? Its about this! Look at example one of good review (most of them are real aplications). I dont say, FX is great, but still I dont agree with FX is fail.

[Manicdan]

Well I did, and the review you linked to is nothing special... if anything it lacks some thing others do... the most sophisticated bench suites are on Toms Hardware and HT4u, toms because it test video edeting and compiler performance (which noone des beside hardware.fr) and HT4U especial for various audio encoding apps. I also like Techreport for testing Scientific apps.

And before screaming foul better take a look at this first:

Some of the larger reviewsites compared what they bench

Apps/Synth:


Games:


Combined:

can you add totals to each column and row easily?
the only thing missing is the average % diff vs competition, but that would take all weekend

[Hornet331]

Only done it for the full one:

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images...appsnumbe.png/

[dess]

Well, BD is very similar to Prescott in many ways, it is very very sensitive to the code quality, due to the fact that each thread of a core only have 2 large decoder, the front end is very limited, and you have to wait for more decode steps to feed your out of order more parallelism opportunity.

So you say AMD lied when they've presented BD's uarch with one 4-way decoder in the frontend, and it's really two 2-way ones in the integer clusters? And so there is also an x-way one in the FPU, or what?

Or, are you speaking about that while peak IPC/thread = peak IPC/core with SMT, it's (peak IPC/module)/2 per thread with CMT? Well, that I've also pointed out earlier in this (edit: the other) topic, and asked what could be the rationale behind it.

Anyway, I think the peak IPC is really 3.0/thread here (normal integer x86/x64 instructions wise), because of code-fusion Opteron146 has mentioned already.

the most sophisticated bench suites are on Toms Hardware and HT4u, toms because it test video edeting and compiler performance

Too bad some of Tom's tests are flawed.

BTW, five more to include, if you will: TechSpot, Legion Hardware, Hi Tech Legion, oZeros, VR-Zone.

[Drwho?]

I would never dare to say that AMD is lieing, What I am saying is that something on the front end is holding back each thread decoders to a max of 2 , nothing more than than, nothing less. And no, I can't find case where it goes up to 3. Don't put evil words in my mouth.
Please stop speculating, get a CPU and try.

Francois

[Movieman]

Dave, if you are reading this, I would certainly recommend a new avatar

The avatar change by me was and is a way to say Thanks to AMD for the trip down there.
Also that I would be testing one.
I've had at different times both AMD and Intel avatars and others..
Now can I please get back to testing this chip?

[dess]

I would never dare to say that AMD is lieing

It looked like you said there is a 2-way decoder in every integer core, which is against the official communication of the uarch. But probably we misunderstood you.

What I am saying is that something on the front end is holding back each thread decoders to a max of 2 , nothing more than than, nothing less.

It's the decoding or the execution, really? There are two ALU's per integer core, so obviously it's a limiting factor. Do you mean this or that the decoder behaves indeed like if there were two separate 2-way (non-SIMD) integer decoders, as well?

And no, I can't find case where it goes up to 3.

I was referring to the Branch Fusion that the Opt. Guide is speaking about, but I guess I was wrong.

Don't put evil words in my mouth.

That was a question only, but I'm sorry for the wording.

Please stop speculating, get a CPU and try.

Well, it's not that easy to get one, right now. (And I think I will wait and see, for a while, anyway.)

[behrouz]

Any kernel linux for BD ? how about Performance of BD on Linux compare to Win ? There's hope for BD if Linux supports it?

[FlanK3r]

hornet: yes, u right, here is more interesting reviews. But I saw also some "sh1t" reviews with only syntetics comparsions. Some people read this one or two and they have different look at product. I think, its average product in line from 1100t up to 2500k.

[kl0012]

Some Linux benchmarks:
http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1...LI-BULLDOZER29
Seems like OpenSSL and Gcrypt don't love Bulldozer as much as TrueCrypt for Windows loves it.

[Leeghoofd]

Also take into consideration Flanker that some websites only had the CPU for a few days... so running a full real suite is difficult. Plus if you want to compare with older gear, synthetic is usually the way to go as results hardly are influenced ( due to patches etc...) Only with 3D it can get difficult (newer drivers) I honestly have got nothing against synthetic benchmarks as usually they already show the strenghts and weaknesses of a new CPU architecture. I think many reviewers are working on an update to include more tests... as this CPU architecture works best with newer apps...

If this FX-8150 ran at 4.5Ghz stock with a power draw of less than 200W then I would buy one myself...

[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.

[dinos22]

where's the UD7 review bro

[Kuroimaho]

Nice to see the drama continues



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.

I agree this drama is going on for 4+ years, and apparently it resets with every new amd arch launch.

So K10 was supposed to be awesome kill Intel and all, and it was crap, so came the promises of Bulldozer with SSE in 2009 and it will be awesome and kill Intel.
Now it is the end of 2011 Bulldozer arrived 2 years late and it is crap again, but we have promises that something will come which...

I can see where it is going, ever since they got conroed all they do is make wonderful slides of products which will be late and deliver performance what Intel already offered when their cpu was supposed to come out years ago.

No doubt they will be fixing this mess just like K10 and probably make something useful out of it, but this is already too little too late. I will not believe another AMD slide, will not believe JF, until they can start to deliver on their promises for a change.

[Opteron146]

I would never dare to say that AMD is lying, What I am saying is that something on the front end is holding back each thread decoders to a max of 2 , nothing more than than, nothing less.

Well nice of you, but we have a clear binary case here, either it's 1 or it's 0. One statement has to be true, either AMD is lying, or your measurements are wrong. I thought a bit more and googled a bit.

Questions that arouse:

a) How many threads did you run on a module? 1 or 2?
b) How did you order your instructions? Did you write higher-level C code and let a compiler optimize it, or did you write assembler? It looks like Bulldozer is le gourmet in the field of processors, it wants to have it's data properly cooked and nicely arranged:

http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2010-06/msg00402.html
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2010-07/msg00717.html

Maybe you are right with unoptimized code and AMD is right with optimized & aligned code? If you didn't write assembler try a newer GCC version, I think 4.6 should be ok.

Please stop speculating, get a CPU and try.

As I said before, I would like to, but would you pay money for such a CPU? Well .. you already have one, I guess I should ask somebody else ^^

[saint19]

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.


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.

Wow man, awesomw words but there is something that i can't understand. Are you disagree with all those reviews? Do you think than numbre of reviews in favor of AMD should be less?

Sent from my Android using TapaTalk

[InCredible]

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.

now there might be issues with k10 on 32nm but a lot less then what bulldozer is having...its pretty straightforward you have a working tech shrink it, increase clocks, add some new features have a much better product, keep bulldozer arch back until its perfected a bit better and actually beats something..i think this approach would of been a lot better and probably could of had a release a lot earlier with a more competing product..

sort of like amd's 4-5-6 series..shrink it increase speed add features and the product keeps producing while becoming more efficient.