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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Gasaraki88 - Friday, October 21, 2011 - link
I think the main competitor for Intel in the future is going to be the ARM processor makers. As Intel goes in to that space with the x86 and the ARM chips getting faster and faster and Windows 8 supporting ARM, you get a mix and soon ARM chip will invade the desktop/laptop market.AMD is done.
ppro - Monday, October 24, 2011 - link
I decided to get this new cpu from www.amd.comnavair2 - Monday, October 24, 2011 - link
I decided to try AMD when I "inherited" my brother's older socket 939 hardware some years ago, then built my own using a Phenom II X4 940 BE.At the time it was released, the 940 wasn't too far behind the i7 920 in many respects, plus it was about $70 cheaper...I was very satisfied with my decision. However, after 3 years of advancement by both companies and watching Intel ONCE AGAIN come up with something that gives excellent performance with ever-increasing power reduction, I was on the fence about Bulldozer even before the reviews came out.
Once I saw the majority of the reviews, I knew what side of the fence to be on for obvious reasons..."Bulldozer" just didn't hit the expectations I thought it should, especially when it comes to load power consumption. Perhaps in a couple years when it matures, but I didn't feel like waiting for AMD to iron out all the wrinkles.
My next build is already done and sorry to say, it's NOT AMD. For what I do the i5-2500K is just too good to pass up at combo prices that result in a $200 processor ( less than what I payed for my X4 940 when IT was new).
Best wishes AMD, I hope you can make "Bulldozer" work, but for now "BD" stands for "Big Disappointment". I'll check back with you in a year or so to see how things are doing.
johnsmith9875 - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - link
Intel's first "dual core" was actually 2 processors on one chip.They could have saved a lot of engineering time by merely shoehorning two X6 Thuban processors together at 32nm and sell it as a 12 core. Now that would have rocked!
Poxenium - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - link
Does anybody remember the first Intel processors with the entirely new architecture called Core Duo, Conroe-L or something ? They were pretty lousy at first, with slightly higher performance than the previous generation, but constantly overheating. later the Core 2 Duo was a complete success, not to mention the first generation iCore processors and of course Sandy Bridge.Considering the fact that these Bulldozer processors are AMD's first attempt at a completely new architecture, I say that both performance and power consumption are at reasonable levels. Upcoming models will surely do a lot better.
shbdf - Friday, November 4, 2011 - link
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Wolfpup - Friday, November 4, 2011 - link
I'd love to see how well the SMP client runs on an "8 core" Bulldozer part compared with a quad Sandy Bridge, and for that matter a 6 core Phenom 2 and 6 core Nehalam.It SEEMS like it should do really well, right? Or not? Because basically an 8 core Bulldozer is a quad core when it comes to floating point, right? And Folding uses a lot of floating point? Or...?
Also, if it really has double the transistor count of Sandy Bridge...where is the performance? It seems like even on heavily threaded stuff it's just kind of about equal with Sandy Bridge, which doesn't seem right....
JumpingJack - Sunday, November 6, 2011 - link
Except for the fact even with that 'professional' software the competitor is just as fast or faster consuming 30% less power.it is unfortunate for AMD and their fan base bit BD is definitely a dud.
JumpingJack - Sunday, November 6, 2011 - link
Considering the power consumption and the reported problems with many games, e.g. Dues Ex, Portal 2, Shogun ... I would see this more appealing around the $180 mark. The 1100T is a better buy if you must do AMD.JumpingJack - Sunday, November 6, 2011 - link
The statement is partially true. There are quite a few apps that the Thuban outnguns BD and many cases where it out performs on energy effiency as well.