AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer finally tested

[Mech0z]

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.

It does beat stuff, just not on consumer market and margins are on enterprice products, not consumer, and I am pretty sure OEM will still sell this and go "8 CORES SUPER PERFORMANCE" and then we only got entausiasts left and they are a very slim margin of sales I suppose.

[informal]

K10 is shorter pipeline design and there is no guarantee whatsoever that on 32nm it can clock higher than Bulldozer. Bulldozer on the other hand was designed with 30% more clock target and pipeline was completely redesigned in order to achieve this goal. AMD will fix the power draw issues in time ,maybe with PD or maybe even with the next stepping (C0 8150/8170?) and they will be able to scale up this core to MUCH higher clock speeds with smaller nodes (think 28nm and lower). K10 started at 2.3GHz @ 65nm at first and ended up at 3.7Ghz @45nm. Keep in mind that K10 was not designed with high clock speed in mind,while Bulldozer is. So if K10 hit 3.7Ghz on mature 45nm node, Bulldozer++ on 28nm node should be able to hit much higher than 4Ghz and stay within 125/95W brackets. Couple this with core(IPC) and uncore improvements and AMD is set for next 4 years,maybe even more ,when it comes to competing with the giant intel.

Another interesting thing is Zambezi's Linux performance. This is what I posted in News section thread:
How is 8150 performing under Linux in Phronix test suite? This is what Michael Larabel @ Phoronix posted yesterday (thanks to dresdenboy's blog):

Posted by Michael Larabel on October 14, 2011
Here's the first Linux benchmarks of AMD's FX-Series Bulldozer desktop CPUs that launched on Tuesday. Specifically, it's Gentoo Linux performance results for an AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer.

The AMD FX-8150 Linux benchmark results can be found on OpenBenchmarking.org. It's an eight-core AMD FX-8150 on an ASUS Sabertooth 990FX motherboard with 4GB of RAM. Gentoo Linux was used with the Linux 3.0.6 kernel and GCC 4.5.3. Unfortunately, this system is not under my control and there's no direct comparisons available for this hardware system to any other AMD processors.

While there may not be any direct comparisons and these Bulldozer Linux benchmarks are coming in from an independent user running the Phoronix Test Suite and uploading the results to OpenBenchmarking.org, you can compare your system to this FX-8150 Gentoo desktop by running phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1110131-LI-BULLDOZER29 from the latest Phoronix Test Suite client.

Though thanks to the unique OpenBenchmarking.org feature-set, the OpenBenchmarking.org Performance Classifications (OPC) and OpenBenchmarking.org Performance Classification Index (PCI), you can see how this eight-core AMD Bulldozer compares to other Linux systems. Visit this link for the performance classification of this new octal-core processor.

With the OPC results, the "Processor Tests" are the important ones. The FX-8150 results overlayed on the OPC heat-maps indicate that the performance is high-end compared to all of the other systems on OpenBenchmarking.org that have run these tests in the past 120 days. The 7-Zip, NPB, OpenSSL, Tachyon, and Smallpt results highlight this processor the best while the performance in Crafty and EP.B NPB is not as desirable.

[gallag]

So what you are saying is all we have to do is wait and amd will give us good performance, can't see any reason to doudt that lol.

8 cores, 2 billion transistors, 5 years of hype and it is slower than not only the competitions products but also there previous gen while consuming more power. Still the same people try to paint a rosy picture.

Remember when the intel fanboys said the p4d was better and shouted about the one or two benchmarks that it won in while ignoring power and heat, funny.

[informal]

So what you are saying is all we have to do is wait and amd will give us good performance, can't see any reason to doudt that lol.

8 cores, 2 billion transistors, 5 years of hype and it is slower than not only the competitions products but also there previous gen while consuming more power. Still the same people try to paint a rosy picture.

Actually someone counted it (from all the reviews) and 8150 is ahead of 1100T(usually between 15 and 30%) in 70 or 71(cannot recall the exact number) individual reviews while being behind 1100T in 20,usually single threaded and spanning across very few applications like lame and itunes. So more facts and less imagination please.

[AliG]

Right, so by definition didn't ipc decrease? The question that people are having with this design is despite its modularity, wouldn't an 8 core k10.5 processor have been a better option on an immature 32nm process? Clearly power leakage, transistor density, and size are major issues right now.

Given that we know AMD is purposely sacrificing ipc in favor of more cores with cmt (JF himself said 180% of performance for 35% die space, now clearly those numbers are skewed, but that was the idea in mind) why not just wait for a node where its easy to slap on 8 modules? Now I can see BD becoming intriguing for servers once you hit 16 integer cores per die, but right now it just doesn't make sense imo to buy their product over an intel one. Sales are the final goal right? So you always put out your best line up, not what sounds best on paper imo.

Now the review here where the guy disabled all the secondary integer cores proves that ipc is taking a massive hit from CMT (and thus it has been inferred that the 2 ALUs just aren't enough). Once again, with a die shrink I'm sure AMD could go to 4 2-way ALUs instead over the 4 1-way design and that likely would fix all their ipc problems.

[Brice MJ]

So what you are saying is all we have to do is wait and amd will give us good performance, can't see any reason to doudt that lol.

8 cores, 2 billion transistors, 5 years of hype and it is slower than not only the competitions products but also there previous gen while consuming more power. Still the same people try to paint a rosy picture.

Remember when the intel fanboys said the p4d was better and shouted about the one or two benchmarks that it won in while ignoring power and heat, funny.

You're talking to the same people that expected Zambezi to give Sandy Bridge a run for its money in multi-threaded apps while being 5% slower at max in ST, so no surprise they're in full damage control now.

Zambezi is so slow in ST that even with the second core in each module disabled (4M/4T) it cant reach Deneb IPC, what a shame.

http://www.hardware.fr/medias/photos...IMG0033907.gif

There are some people expecting huge IPC jumps in Piledriver, but they seem to forget this piece of the Tom's Hardware review.

"How will Piledriver get its projected 10 to 15 percent speed up? AMD says one-third will come from IPC improvements like structure size increases (so, three to five percent) and two-thirds will come from power optimizations that reduce consumption, enabling higher frequencies at a constant TDP (another six to 10 percent)."

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...fx,3043-9.html

AMD better reach their 30% higher clocks than K10.5 goal really fast, if they do so and lower power comsumptions it may give us Thuban users a reason not to go to Intel.

[mAJORD]

Right, so by definition didn't ipc decrease? The question that people are having with this design is despite its modularity, wouldn't an 8 core k10.5 processor have been a better option on an immature 32nm process? .

You haven't played with Llano have you? ( a 4 Core processor that can't get past 2.9Ghz )

[kl0012]

K10 is shorter pipeline design and there is no guarantee whatsoever that on 32nm it can clock higher than Bulldozer. Bulldozer on the other hand was designed with 30% more clock target and pipeline was completely redesigned in order to achieve this goal.

Just few years ago AMD said that Intel was going in a wrong direction with lower IPC, long pipeline, and higher clock. And not AMD just said that, they also proved that. Moreover Intel completely understood its own mistakes and fixed its direction. Isn't it incredibly stupid to take this route again?

AMD will fix the power draw issues in time ,maybe with PD or maybe even with the next stepping (C0 8150/8170?) and they will be able to scale up this core to MUCH higher clock speeds with smaller nodes (think 28nm and lower).

I would not count on this. Not only the tech. process is broken, but the "speed demon" cpu design has been proven as generally inefficient. I remember Andy Grove saying "truly sorry" for Pentium 4 inability to reach 4GHz. I doubt someone at AMD have (or will have) the guts to say this.

[informal]

You seem to forget that AMD is at least one process node behind so they need a design that can reach higher frequencies over longer periods of time. They managed to do this with short pipeline K10,they will manage it with 15h,just a matter of time I guess. Also,IPC did decrease somewhat but not always and not by a huge amount. Problem is thread bouncing and inefficient scheduling. AMD is also stubborn and they opted for maximum Turbo with threads grouping on same modules(CUs) over more limited one with threads scheduling on individual modules (CUs) first .
Bottom line is that obviously 15h has a lot of room to grow,it's just a first one in the long family of CPUs. They will bring the IPC up every year,the thing we didn't have with K10 (if you remember ,we got 6% from 65nm->45nm after 2 years and this was mostly L3 cache and a few % was pure core improvements; Llano @ 32nm gets another 3-6% on average with pure core improvements and this is after another 2 years!). So each year they expect to raise IPC (sub 10% or so) and increase clock while maintaining power draw or lowering it via node shrinks. They can add CUs easily and can make a next-gen Fusion type 15h based chip via coupling the "graphics core Next " with the FP coprocessor. So design is still in its infancy and has a lot of room to grow (unlike P4 which didn't grow anywhere ,it went to history).

[Stukov]

As modular as their design is, why didn't they just include a K10.5 core to boost single thread performance? If M-Space lets you mix and match with GPU/CPU why not include it and have the best of both worlds?

[Hornet331]

So design is still in its infancy and has a lot of room to grow (unlike P4 which didn't grow anywhere ,it went to history).

Now you are drifting into denial mode again...

P4 had improvments in each iteration, Northwood addad a nice IPC gain over willamette + also netted higher frequencies but still was not able to do anything to the upcoming A64 and struggeld agains the athlon XP (at a much lower freq). But with Prescott intel has gone into full retarded mode making the pipeline even longer and even more cache couldn't save it´, because the cache had high latencies and even lost to Northwood im some cases...

The thing that i hope AMD doesn't do is to try to get mhz at all cost or we see the same thing intel stumbled into...

[informal]

Now you are drifting into denial mode again...

P4 had improvments in each iteration, Northwood addad a nice IPC gain over willamette + also netted higher frequencies but still was not able to do anything to the upcoming A64 and struggeld agains the athlon XP (at a much lower freq). But with Prescott intel has gone into full retarded mode making the pipeline even longer and even more cache couldn't save it´, because the cache had high latencies and even lost to Northwood im some cases...

The thing that i hope AMD doesn't do is to try to get mhz at all cost or we see the same thing intel stumbled into...

No I am stating facts and you know it. If you believe that design has no room to grow then you are in full denial mode .

[Drwho?]

No I am stating facts and you know it. If you believe that design has no room to grow then you are in full denial mode .

I hope they will follow your recommendation, that would make my life much easier ... Welcome to P4 hell ... (very personal opinion, never representing my employer here in this forum)

Francois

[Hornet331]

Wait wat.. you just said P4 had no room to grow... but in fact it did, but it wasn't enough... and personally I see the same for BD or every other iteration of it. It has growth potential, but it will be never enough to match anything intel will offer as long as they stick to that.

Hell per core performanec on piledriver will be at the same level as deneb is now... and piledriver is still 6-9 month away...

[Brice MJ]

Wait wat.. you just said P4 had no room to grow... but in fact it did, but it wasn't enough... and personally I see the same for BD or every other iteration of it. It has growth potential, but it will be never enough to match anything intel will offer as long as they stick to that.

Hell per core performanec on piledriver will be at the same level as deneb is now... and piledriver is still 6-9 month away...

And Intel is also talking about IPC improvements for Ivy Bridge, probably the same ~5-10% Piledriver will receive. GF's 32nm will eventually allow for much higher clocks, but I expect 22nm Tri-Gate to do the same for the competition, all at lower TDP than Sandy Bridge.

[Chumbucket843]

No I am stating facts and you know it. If you believe that design has no room to grow then you are in full denial mode .

you are backing an opinion with facts. personally i doubt that nodes will permit faster clockspeeds over the next few years. if there is any trend it's probably slower. bulldozer mainly has room for improvement because they messed it up. i would speculate that gobalfoundries screwed up 32nm as well, how much is hard to know. i do agree that BD will likely improve, but that's ways off. the world of technology lives in the urgent.

[demonkevy666]

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

i'm no cpu designer/engineer
but write is horrible and L1 data cache is write threw L1 write look to be half of what he should be, L2 half and even L3 is half.
maybe it's the fact it's still 2 way for that 64Kbytes of cache maybe they should bump it to 4 way.

So what you are saying is all we have to do is wait and amd will give us good performance, can't see any reason to doudt that lol.

8 cores, 2 billion transistors, 5 years of hype and it is slower than not only the competitions products but also there previous gen while consuming more power. Still the same people try to paint a rosy picture.

Remember when the intel fanboys said the p4d was better and shouted about the one or two benchmarks that it won in while ignoring power and heat, funny.

cost less then a a gpu lol jk.

As modular as their design is, why didn't they just include a K10.5 core to boost single thread performance? If M-Space lets you mix and match with GPU/CPU why not include it and have the best of both worlds?

why that's genius!

[informal]

Wait wat.. you just said P4 had no room to grow... but in fact it did, but it wasn't enough... and personally I see the same for BD or every other iteration of it. It has growth potential, but it will be never enough to match anything intel will offer as long as they stick to that.

Hell per core performanec on piledriver will be at the same level as deneb is now... and piledriver is still 6-9 month away...

Do you know what is intel planning for Haswell? Is Haswell entirely new design or Core evolution? I think intel stated it's a clean slate new design. So if by a far stretch haswell fails to match IB per clock will you call it a failure too?
Bulldozer 1 was probably made with some compromises in mind. They will improve the design,it's logical thing to do. They have room now to increase both clock and IPC. Whether or not it will be enough to match what intel offers,especially in server space,remains to be seen. I think they will do just fine if GloFo doesn't stumble in the process side of things.

[Hornet331]

Yes , for me, it will be failure if it cant reach the same IPC as its predecessor, same as P4 was compared to P3. Because every singel speed demon design for the consumer market was a failure. ST performance is still of significant relevance for the Consumer market.

[informal]

Yes , for me, it will be failure if it cant reach the same IPC as its predecessor, same as P4 was compared to P3. Because every singel speed demon design for the consumer market was a failure. ST performance is still of significant relevance for the Consumer market.

Even if it achieves higher performance than 4C/6C IB via more cores/caches/ISA extensions and clockspeed?
BTW consumer market is changing ,although the pace is rather slow.Give it a year or so and it will get better. More and more applications are being designed with multicore in mind,it's just a matter of time when we will have more MT aware apps versus ST ones. Also,we will have GPU compute powers put to good use. This will pave a way for hybrid CPU/GPU chips in 4-5 years and they will be able to use that enormous compute power for client and server workloads.

[Manicdan]

Yes , for me, it will be failure if it cant reach the same IPC as its predecessor, same as P4 was compared to P3. Because every singel speed demon design for the consumer market was a failure. ST performance is still of significant relevance for the Consumer market.

yeah ST is very important, i would need to see 20% more single threaded perf (either through clocks or IPC), before i would be willing to purchase it.
multi threaded perf isnt horrendous but its so spread out, and CMT didnt give us 180%, it was ~150% and i wonder how much more potential is there.
fixing those 2 things and it would be worth 315mm2.

[Sentential]

Do you know what is intel planning for Haswell? Is Haswell entirely new design or Core evolution? I think intel stated it's a clean slate new design. So if by a far stretch haswell fails to match IB per clock will you call it a failure too?
Bulldozer 1 was probably made with some compromises in mind. They will improve the design,it's logical thing to do. They have room now to increase both clock and IPC. Whether or not it will be enough to match what intel offers,especially in server space,remains to be seen. I think they will do just fine if GloFo doesn't stumble in the process side of things.

I had a nice long post ready to go but freaking PC BSODed on me; ill keep it shorter this time. The problem with AMD can be summed up like this; Their board of directors are ing idiots. They run the company they bankroll most of what goes on and they pick the CEOs. The only way AMD is going to survive is if the board goes and or the company is taken private. If you look at AMD's history they are chasing a dream cooked up by the marketing folks there who are convinced that the Pentium 4 is the reason they are failing. Not that they dont advertise worth a damn. Not that THEY had failed to make a compelling argument based on the benefits of their option being better overall. NO no no no no this was a MESSAGE issue NOT the delivery; why the sales and marketing people are infallable; THEY didnt screw this up; the ENGINEERS did.

You may think thats absurd but look at it from their shoes:

When the A64 was successful people in droves bought P4s. Why? Was it because they were being paid off to do so; yes but that was stopped. After it stopped people STILL bought P4s and I can just picture some pencil neck asswipe in their marketing branch who thinks its because of HT and because of the mhz. Because they had a higher freq and because it showed more than 1 thread in there that people believed it was better and that in order for AMD to win they have to behave that way.

So what is their response? Well if we cant beat them on process we MUST beat them on speed because people are retards and wont look up the fact sheet all they see are "cores" (which I'm sure was focus grouped) and Ghz. Thats it. They thought people might look into their products more but have concluded people are worthless sheeple as evidence by their lack of marketshare gain in the A64 days.

So instead of focuing on their niche group who buys them religously they said it; its all or nothing we're going all in.

And what did we end up with? The one thing they've been coveting for years; the pentium 4. Now all their little marketing drones can herp derp about more cores and more speed; real performance be damned. Reality doesnt mean a damn thing as long as it looks good on a power point; just look at all the reality TV out there. What happened to AMD is a sad reflection on how ignorance has been celebrated in this country.

I will make a prediction. I gaurntee you will see all kinds of reports saying that this is the highest grossing processor they've ever brought to market. And sadly they may be right; if this chip is a success god help us all.

[xVeinx]

Even if it achieves higher performance than 4C/6C IB via more cores/caches/ISA extensions and clockspeed?
BTW consumer market is changing ,although the pace is rather slow.Give it a year or so and it will get better. More and more applications are being designed with multicore in mind,it's just a matter of time when we will have more MT aware apps versus ST ones. Also,we will have GPU compute powers put to good use. This will pave a way for hybrid CPU/GPU chips in 4-5 years and they will be able to use that enormous compute power for client and server workloads.

The consumer market is changing, but nowhere near as fast or in exactly the same direction as many expected. We've been assuming the advance of GPGPU-based software for years, and it still is fairly limited. Development time of software is increasing as the technical details become more advanced and complexity of operating systems and APIs increases. Ingenuity and creativity can abound, but then the application requires a surrounding context; new technology can breed new ideas, new "needs", and new direction. AMD made a bet on where the future is headed with computing when designing the architecture (whether or not it turned out exactly as they hoped), and it is yet to be seen whether or not that will pay off. At some point, businesses look at their current needs and direction, with currently available software, to make their purchases. If the architecture and resulting power matches the needs, then they'll buy it, else not. AMD's bet is one that assumes that the future payoff will be greater, while the immediate payoff not as overwhelming. Their job becomes harder if they have to push developers to new directions when they can still take an easier route (And sometimes that easier route is the best route! It's not mutually exclusive.). The processor isn't nearly as bad as it seems based on some of the reviews (yes, I have first hand experience), but it isn't going to meet the requirements for everyone either. If AMD want's their approach and architecture to do well, they are going to have to not only improve it and work out bugs, they are going to have to build a software and API (developers "enjoy" the iOS-type API approach; it's where Microsoft, Apple, Android, and even Ubuntu have been heading for awhile) ecosystem surrounding it. I'm not sure they are ready for the latter to be honest...

[Hornet331]

Even if it achieves higher performance than 4C/6C IB via more cores/caches/ISA extensions and clockspeed?
BTW consumer market is changing ,although the pace is rather slow.Give it a year or so and it will get better. More and more applications are being designed with multicore in mind,it's just a matter of time when we will have more MT aware apps versus ST ones. Also,we will have GPU compute powers put to good use. This will pave a way for hybrid CPU/GPU chips in 4-5 years and they will be able to use that enormous compute power for client and server workloads.

More cores don't yield you more ST performance, same goes for ISA extensions it don't yields you more performance in current apps. It was the same issue that plagued all P4s... SSE2 performance wsn't that bad. But hardly any apps used it, it took years till people adoped it. Today its still the case, look how many apps use SSE4.x and how many can make use of it... The only thing that would yield more performance if IPC goes down is clock speed. And the more IPC you loose the more clock you need. Lets say haswell looses 15% IPC compared to IB, now it needs at least 15% clock to only reach the speed of IB, then you wan't also a performance increase ~10%... so you need 25% more clock... considering that IB probably will be close to the 4ghz mark, you need a 5ghz haswell to beat a 4ghz IB... nope same situation as we see now with BD... powerconsumption will be trough the roof compared to its predecessor for only a marginal increase in performance.

PPl tell me now for nearly a decade consumer market is changing.. yet performance is still determined by ST.. its the same thing with gpu computing... (just that isn't that long). Its a whole other picture in the professional market, but thats not what we discuss right now.

[mattkosem]

PPl tell me now for nearly a decade consumer market is changing.. yet performance is still determined by ST.

Says you. More and more user applications are taking advantage of multiple cores every day, gaming and otherwise. Single threaded performance isn't a be all end all stat across the board, not by a long shot.

--Matt