The Bulldozer Review: AMD FX-8150 Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 12, 2011 1:27 AM ESTPower Consumption
Performing cross-platform power consumption comparisons is difficult simply because there is a lot of variance between motherboards. Looking at the AMD family alone to start with, the FX-8150's additional power and clock gating really pays off as Bulldozer idles at a significantly lower power level than the Phenom IIs. Sandy Bridge still appears to be a bit cooler.
Under load however, Bulldozer consumes quite a bit of power easily outpacing the Phenom II X6:
I suppose Global's 32nm process in combination with Bulldozer's high frequency targets are to blame here.
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Iketh - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
AMD Exec a year ago: "We about ready to release BD?"AMD Engineer: "Soon. At 4ghz, we're actually slower per thread and using double the power than Phenom at 3.4ghz, but we'll get there..."
AMD Exec: /gquit
lyeoh - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
Bulldozer reminds me of the P4/Prescott for some reason ;).High clock, high watts, but not enough performance.
Might be faster in parallelizable tasks but most people with such tasks would just buy more computers and build large clusters.
Iketh - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
The processors are popping up on Newegg now... the 8120 for $220 and 6100 for $190vol7ron - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
Sigh... I made the mistake in buying a Prescott. Not to mention I bought an "E" batch, which ran even hotter and weren't as overclockable.actionjksn - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
Yeah I had one of those hot potato's too. Back then we thought Intel was finished.just4U - Thursday, October 13, 2011 - link
ckryan, you stated you were blown away by the 2500K yes? It's odd you know.. I've owned a PII 920, PII 1055, PII 955 (tested lots of lowbie $60-80 parts from AMD to) .. also used a i7 920, i7 955 i5 2500k i7 2600k (my most recent one) and .. I am not blown away by any of them..Last time I was blown away by a cpu was the Q6600..(before that the A64 3200+) since then other cpu's have been better but not so much so that I'd say that it was night and day differences.
CeriseCogburn - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Ok that was some enormously skilled twisting and spinning. BD is an epic failure, period. I can't envision anyone with any needs, need, or combo thereof choosing it.\It's so bad amd lied about it's transistor count.
Forget it, it's an epic fail and never anything more.
jiffylube1024 - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
Ugh, BD is quite the disappointment. The power consumption is absolutely through the roof -- unacceptable for 32nm, really!With that said, I am very intrigued in the FX-4100 4-core 3.6GHz part. This should be the replacement for the Athlon II 2-4 core series, and I'm very interested to see how it does vs ~3 GHz Athlon II X2's, X3's and X4's.
yankeeDDL - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
Wow ...I'm blown away.
I have been waiting for BD's reviews and benchmarks for months. I have waited for BD for my new rig.
I have used AMD for the past 8 years and I am ... was convinced that it always offered, by far, the best price/performance ratio for entry-level, mid range PCs.
I am a still a big fan of AMD ... but I have to stand corrected. BD is a POS. Longer pipelines? Didn't they learn anything from Pentium 3/4 debacle?
A Phenom II X6 is almost always better than BD, even in power consumption. Come on: if BD had come out shortly after the Phenom I could see it as an incremental improvement, a new baseline to build upon. But it took AMD years to come out with BD ... and this is the result? Disappointing.
I mean, betting everything on higher clock frequencies? At 4GHz? It's no wonder that Intel's IPC improvements are crunching BD: IPC is all about doing more with the same power, clock speed is all about throwing more power to do the same faster ...
Boy. This ruined my day.
yankeeDDL - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
By the way, no matter how AMD slices it, I see the FX-8* as a 4-core CPU. A glorified ohene, but still a 4-core.If I was AMD, I would have considered a fair goal to obliterate the i5-2500 performance with the new FX-8 family, instead it comes short most of the times.
What were they thinking?