The Bulldozer Review: AMD FX-8150 Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 12, 2011 1:27 AM ESTThe Test
To keep the review length manageable we're presenting a subset of our results here. For all benchmark results and even more comparisons be sure to use our performance comparison tool: Bench.
| Motherboard: |
ASUS P8Z68-V Pro (Intel Z68) ASUS Crosshair V Formula (AMD 990FX) |
| Hard Disk: |
Intel X25-M SSD (80GB) Crucial RealSSD C300 |
| Memory: | 2 x 4GB G.Skill Ripjaws X DDR3-1600 9-9-9-20 |
| Video Card: | ATI Radeon HD 5870 (Windows 7) |
| Video Drivers: | AMD Catalyst 11.10 Beta (Windows 7) |
| Desktop Resolution: | 1920 x 1200 |
| OS: | Windows 7 x64 |
Windows 7 Application Performance
3dsmax 9
Today's desktop processors are more than fast enough to do professional level 3D rendering at home. To look at performance under 3dsmax we ran the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 benchmark (only the CPU rendering tests) under 3dsmax 9 SP1. The results reported are the rendering composite scores.
As our first heavily threaded, predominantly FP workload we see the FX-8150 come out swinging. A tangible upgrade from the Phenom II X6, the 8150 is hot on the heelds of the Core i5 2400, however it is unable to compete with the 2500K and 2600K.
Cinebench R10 & 11.5
Created by the Cinema 4D folks we have Cinebench, a popular 3D rendering benchmark that gives us both single and multi-threaded 3D rendering results.
As I alluded to earlier, single threaded performance is going to be a bit of a disappointment with Bulldozer and here you get the first dose of reality. Even considering its clock speed and Turbo Core advantage, the FX-8150 is slower than the Phenom II X6 1100T. Intel's Core i5 2500K delivers nearly 50% better single threaded performance here than the FX-8150.
Crank up the threads and the FX-8150 shines, finally tying the 2500K at a comparable price point.
Even with more modern workloads, the FX-8150 isn't able to compete in single threaded speed. Here the 2500K is 44% faster.
Modern multithreaded workloads however do quite well on Bulldozer. The gains over the old Phenom II X6 1100T are unfortunately not as large as we would expect them to be.
7-Zip Benchmark
Heavily threaded workloads obviously do well on the FX series parts, here in our 7-zip test the FX-8150 is actually faster than Intel's fastest Sandy Bridge.
PAR2 Benchmark
Par2 is an application used for reconstructing downloaded archives. It can generate parity data from a given archive and later use it to recover the archive
Chuchusoft took the source code of par2cmdline 0.4 and parallelized it using Intel’s Threading Building Blocks 2.1. The result is a version of par2cmdline that can spawn multiple threads to repair par2 archives. For this test we took a 708MB archive, corrupted nearly 60MB of it, and used the multithreaded par2cmdline to recover it. The scores reported are the repair and recover time in seconds.
Once again, throw more threads at the processor and the FX-8150 can outperform the Core i5 2500K.
TrueCrypt Benchmark
TrueCrypt is a very popular encryption package that offers full AES-NI support. The application also features a built-in encryption benchmark that we can use to measure CPU performance with:
Bulldozer adds AES-NI acceleration, a feature that wasn't present in the Phenom II X6. As a result the FX-8150 is among the fastest at real time AES encryption/decryption, second only to the 2600K. Intel's artificial segmentation using Hyper Threading comes back to haunt it here as the 2500K is significantly slower than the 8-threaded beast.
x264 HD 3.03 Benchmark
Graysky's x264 HD test uses x264 to encode a 4Mbps 720p MPEG-2 source. The focus here is on quality rather than speed, thus the benchmark uses a 2-pass encode and reports the average frame rate in each pass.
As I mentioned earlier, the first pass of our x264 HD benchmark is a lightly threaded task. As such, the FX-8150 doesn't do very well here. Even the old Phenom II is able to inch ahead of AMD's latest. And Sandy Bridge obviously does very well.
The second pass is more thread heavy, allowing the FX-8150 to flex its muscle and effectively tie the 2600K for first place.
AMD also sent along a couple of x264 binaries that were compiled with AVX and AMD XOP instruction flags. We ran both binaries through our x264 test, let's first look at what enabling AVX does to performance:
Everyone gets faster here, but Intel continues to hold onto a significant performance lead in lightly threaded workloads.
The standings don't change too much in the second pass, the frame rates are simply higher across the board. The FX-8150 is an x86 transcoding beast though, roughly equalling Intel's Core i7 2600K. Although not depicted here, the performance using the AMD XOP codepath was virtually identical to the AVX results.
Adobe Photoshop CS4
To measure performance under Photoshop CS4 we turn to the Retouch Artists’ Speed Test. The test does basic photo editing; there are a couple of color space conversions, many layer creations, color curve adjustment, image and canvas size adjustment, unsharp mask, and finally a gaussian blur performed on the entire image.
The whole process is timed and thanks to the use of Intel's X25-M SSD as our test bed hard drive, performance is far more predictable than back when we used to test on mechanical disks.
Time is reported in seconds and the lower numbers mean better performance. The test is multithreaded and can hit all four cores in a quad-core machine.
Photoshop performance improves tangibly over the Phenom II X6, unfortunately it's not enough to hang with the enthusiast Sandy Bridge parts.
Compile Chromium Test
You guys asked for it and finally I have something I feel is a good software build test. Using Visual Studio 2008 I'm compiling Chromium. It's a pretty huge project that takes over forty minutes to compile from the command line on a dual-core CPU. But the results are repeatable and the compile process will easily stress more than 8 threads on a CPU so it works for me.
Our compiler test has traditionally favored heavily threaded architectures, but here we found the Phenom II X6 1100T to offer a tangible performance advantage over Bulldozer. While AMD is certainly competitive here, this is an example of one of those situations where AMD's architectural tradeoffs simply don't pay off—not without additional clock speed that is.
Excel Monte Carlo
Our final application test is another win for AMD over the Core i5 2500K. The victory is entirely a result of Intel's Hyper Threading restrictions though, the eight-thread 2600K is able to easily outperform Bulldozer. Either way, AMD delivers better performance here for less money.
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AmdInside - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
Their roadmap is aggressive but when is the last time AMD has come close to meeting their schedule? Not going to happen. But do hope that they do for consumers sake.Eagle70ss - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
AMD really bent over and grabbed their ankles....I'm just wondering why it took so long to release douche-dozer...I was really hoping they would have a good part this time...Will Intel stand alone as the sole quality CPU maker?? Only time will tell, but it looks to be so....silverblue - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
I must say, I did expect this. That price drop wasn't exactly a giveaway, was it? Single threaded performance is generally poor and there really is something wrong with the caching. I simply refuse to believe a lack of BIOS optimisations is at fault for any of this... and blaming Windows 7 for not truly understanding Bulldozer's idiosyncracies? Come off it; Windows 8 won't even be around when Piledriver appears, and we'll have to wait to see the second generation of this particular microarchitecture performing more like it "should". Bringing back the FX moniker certainly attracted attention, however if by doing so they wanted to remind us of the fact that the FX-51 was a server CPU, they've succeeded, if only on that basis, as the FX was king of all and not just in select benchmarks as the P4 tended to be.I can't wait for Johan's server review; I just want to see if this thing really does well in its natural habitat. It's got to have a success somewhere. Thankfully, I can see far more optimism in this area. Incidentally, I was expecting Bulldozer to be able to work on eight 128-bit FP instructions per clock as opposed to 6 with Thuban, so obviously I got my wires crossed on that one.
You can't argue that Bulldozer hasn't a lot of promise, but at the same time, you can't argue that AMD haven't been trying to perform damage limitation on an already faulty product.
arjuna1 - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
Nobody, and I mean, nobody at all, expected Bulldozer to reach SB like performance, obvious nobody either saw sub Phenom II performance in certain applications, but almost everything promised has been delivered, at lower prices than Intel, the way AMD has always done it, and quoting the article:"In many ways, where Bulldozer is a clear win is where AMD has always done well in: heavily threaded applications. If you're predominantly running well threaded workloads, Bulldozer will typically give you performance somewhere around or above Intel's 2500K."
PS
wolfman3k5, stop your Intel shilling, it almost look like if Intel was paying you by the hour.
wolfman3k5 - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
I get $22.50 per hour from Intel plus tips. I also get a $50.00 bonus if I surpass 1000 comments / posts per day. Between 3:00AM and 7:00AM I get $25.85 per hour. I make good money writing nice things about Intel. What do you do?g101 - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
What's surprising is that you apparently think that's "good money".Guess what, you little dumbshit kid, profit savvy professionals will sill be running AMD. I couldn't care less about your shitty lightly threaded games and optimized synthetic benchmarks.
Stupid children using their computers for play.
silverblue - Friday, October 14, 2011 - link
You need to bear in mind that a) AMD reintroduced the FX brand just for Zambezi, and b) JF-AMD actually started a thread entitled The Bulldozer Blog Is Live! on www.overclock.net. Regardless of whether John Freuhe is a server-focused guy or not, the point being is that he and AMD both targetted the client side in terms of i) overclockers and ii) gamers. I might be wrong, but that's how I see it. Yes, he didn't come out and say it directly that Zambezi would be a great gaming solution, but he DID say that IPC would be an improvement over their past products. Now that the reviews are out, he's nowhere to be seen, barring the odd login to do who-knows-what. Does overclock.net have any leaning towards the server market in any way?If Zambezi's poor performance is partly down to using faulty ASUS boards/anything less than 1866MHz RAM/an L1 cache bug/some weird hardware combinations/WHATEVER, I'm sure we'll find out in time, but regardless, it's going to be harming non-gaming workloads as well, so it's important to people like you as well.
silverblue - Friday, October 14, 2011 - link
Just thought I'd say that I've been a bit harsh to JF there. Out of all the AMD people who could've come along to have a chat, he was definitely the bravest. It was on his free time, and he's probably getting copious amounts of hate messages just for being an AMD rep.Proxicon - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
I stayed up all night to read this review....I guess the prices on 2600k won't be going down anytime soon. I had already built my complete system in my head. Then the reviews came..
I kind of figured that if AMD was firing people and resignations were being handed in before a major launch, it wasn't going to be good. Also, no early release of benchmarks. That in itself was suspect. If they really had such a great processor than why all the secrecy. I was hoping it was an Apple play. boy, was I wrong.
You guys buy the "faildozer" and help keep the prices of the 2600K low. I'll be looking for a 2600K....
3DVagabond - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
I'm not an expert, but Bulldozer seems to be a server chip pressed into desktop service. Designed for highly threaded workloads many consumer tasks just aren't it's forte (and also designed to have even more cores than 8). While it isn't competitive in single thread performance, if you use highly threaded workloads enough and aren't afraid to O/C to boost the single core performance, Bulldozer can be the better chip. That is if the price is right. The 8120 might be an awesome value in this scenario. We'll have to wait for reviews to be sure.One question, please. When you O/C'd the 8150, did you only use stock cooling? From the review it sounded like you did, but instead of saying so clearly, you said it wouldn't do 5GHz on "air" (I believe that was the statement? Feel free to flame me if I'm wrong. :D). So, to be clear, would it not do 5GHz on air with a top notch cooler, or did you only try the stock cooler?
Thanks.