The Bulldozer Review: AMD FX-8150 Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 12, 2011 1:27 AM ESTThe Impact of Bulldozer's Pipeline
With a new branch prediction architecture and an unknown, but presumably significantly deeper pipline, I was eager to find out just how much of a burden AMD's quest for frequency had placed on Bulldozer. To do so I turned to the trusty N-Queens solver, now baked into the AIDA64 benchmark suite.
The N-Queens problem is simple. On an N x N chessboard, how do you place N queens so they cannot attack one another? Solving the problem is incredibly branch intensive, and as a result it serves as a great measure of the impact of a deeper pipeline.
The AIDA64 implementation of the N-Queens algorithm is heavily threaded, but I wanted to first get a look at single-core performance so I disabled all but a single integer/fp core on Bulldozer, as well as the competing processors. I also looked at constant frequency as well as turbo enabled speeds:
Unfortunately things don't look good. Even with turbo enabled, the 3.6GHz Bulldozer part needs another 25% higher frequency to equal a 3.6GHz Phenom II X4. Even a 3.3GHz Phenom II X6 does better here. Without being fully aware of the optimizations at work in AIDA64 I wouldn't put too much focus on Sandy Bridge's performance here, but Intel is widely known for focusing on branch prediction performance.
If we let the N-Queens benchmark scale to all available threads, the performance issues are easily masked by throwing more threads at the problem:
However it is quite clear that for single or lightly threaded operations that are branch heavy, Bulldozer will be in for a fight.
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arjuna1 - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
I was wondering the same, the OC part of the review seemed rushed by, almost lazy, I hope Anand can correct this and clear the doubts, can one of this cpus be run @ 5ghz or not?silverblue - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
Anand did say that he doesn't yet possess one of the AMD sanctioned water coolers, but will test with it once he does.arjuna1 - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
More of the reason to have considered in testing it with an aftermarket cooler, if it hits 5ghz only with AMD's sanctioned cooler (which given the insignificant difference between Corsair and Antec offerings wouldn't surprise me if it was just a rebrand) it can be a bit of a problem to those of us already using a similar water cooler.arjuna1 - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
they have it on legitreviews running @ 4.9 with water cooling.silverblue - Thursday, October 13, 2011 - link
HardwareHeaven have theirs at 5.2.Jkm3141 - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
I would LOVE to see how this handles a virtual server workloadJohanAnandtech - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
Patience :-). We will do our best with a new virtualization benchmark besides the old one when the Interlagos server arrives.- Johan.
ghosttr - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
Not only does CPU fail, it fails so hard it even struggles to compete with its aging predecessors. A new architecture AND a die shrink and it can barely hold its own.Whats really sad is that AMD could have updated k10, and probably achieved the same (or likely better) results.
bersl2 - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
I'll probably end up buying one. I'm still on my socket-939 Opteron 165, and I can wait a little bit more. Since many of you seem to be wont to skip this one, I'll probably get it at a better price.Also, since I don't give a flying fsck about Windows, I'll probably get a Bulldozer-aware CPU scheduler before you clowns do. :P
Hrel - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
Seriously disapointed now. I'm glad they put more than 2 freaking SATA 6GB ports on the mobo, but that's a 200 dollar+ mobo so it doesn't really matter.AMD's CPU performance is retarted. Honestly, all the hype, all the delays, this is a disaster. Good thing their GPU division is executing well or I'd be seriously worried about this company being around in 4 years.
Intel needs to stop jewing out on their mobo configurations. I need AT LEAST 4 SATA 6GBPS ports and I was like 12 USB 3.0 ports, but even with my gripes about them cheaping out on mobo's and switching sockets every year or two... at least their CPU's have gotten faster in the last 6 years. Beyond just expected incremental gains like AMD has made.... or this time around hasn't.