![\"\"](\"http:\/\/i1.wp.com\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/UnlockedFXProcessorLogo.jpg\" "\\"UnlockedFXProcessorLogo\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nWe will briefly introduce the new FX Bulldozer architecture and then head right into our evaluation which will highlight performance in 20 modern games at 1920×1200 and 2560×1600. We will also run synthetic and real world benchmarks on our stock-clocked and overclocked FX-8150.\u00a0 We will work to establish its performance in games when paired with a single HD 6970 and also with HD 6970 CrossFire-X2. In this way, we will see if the FX-8150 is worth the $245 that AMD is asking for it.<\/p>\n
Here is how AMD visualizes their line-up.\u00a0 Although they say it is not indicative of performance positioning, it generally is.\u00a0 You may also notice that AMD does not include Intel’s highest end LGA 1366 platform and that Intel will again lock down the high end when Sandy Bridge-E launches later on this month.<\/p>\n AMD has been working on new CPU architecture since long before Phenom II. Phenom II reached its performance peak in gaming with the 980 Black Edition (BE) which we reviewed here<\/a> a few months ago.\u00a0 It is AMD’s fastest 4-core processor and it sports a stock CPU speed of 3.7GHz. We were able to overclock ours to 4.3GHz and that is the speed that we shall test it at; very nearly at the current limit of the Phenom II architecture on air-cooling.<\/p>\n The stock speed of the FX-8150 is 3.6GHz; however, Turbo Core mode allows 4 cores to reach 3.9GHz on all 8-cores and 4.2GHz with 4-cores if there is sufficient thermal headroom. So basically we are putting up a 4.2GHz Bulldozer against a Phenom II clocked at 4.3GHz. And we also able to give our FX-8150 an overclocked boost of all 8 cores to 4.4GHz, to give you an idea of its scaling in games.<\/p>\n AMD is positioning their top FX-8150 CPU against Intel’s upper midrange – specifically against the i5 2500K. Our test CPU is the older “Bloomfield” Core i7-920 which we can stably clock past 3.8GHz (with turbo on a single core to 4.0GHz). Overclocked, it should offer similar performance to the stock-clocked i5 2500K (3.4\/3.8GHz) in gaming with a single powerful video card like HD 6970 or the GTX 580 at resolutions at or above 1080p.\u00a0 Here is AMD’s chart which shows AMD’s FX on-paper advantages over Intel’s competing CPUs.<\/p>\n The FX-8150 looks great on paper.\u00a0 The Phenom II’s tradition “weakness” against Intel’s Core2 processors have always been their single- and lightly-threaded performance.\u00a0 And with the recent release of Intel’s Sandy Bridge i5 2500K and i5 2600K, the performance gap has widened in Intel’s favor.\u00a0 We are going to be looking to see what AMD has done to close the gap with the new Bulldozer architecture.<\/p>\n Head over to the next page and we’ll find more out about Bulldozer architecture<\/p>\n <\/p>\n What is Bulldozer?<\/strong><\/p>\n Phenom II has reached its end of its useful life.\u00a0 There have been few changes to AMD’s basic architecture since about 2003.\u00a0 Bulldozer is the next iteration of AMD CPUs that are particularly useful for servers and have also been adopted for the desktop as the basis for AMD’s next generation CPUs that will probably be in use for years to come.<\/p>\n Here is AMD’s now-public roadmap:<\/p>\n Now that we know that Bulldozer is expected to scale beyond 2014, lets look at the architecture.<\/p>\n Bulldozer’s design allows two cores to each share a larger, higher-performance function unit – as a floating point unit (FPU), for example – with less total die area than having separate, smaller function units for each core.<\/p>\n The floating point unit in \u201cBulldozer\u201d has been re-designed from Phenom II. It has been improved to support new instructions and to allow resource sharing between its cores. There are two 128-bit FMACs shared per module which allows for two 128-bit instructions per core or one 256-bit instruction per dual-core module.<\/p>\n Bulldozer’s front-end unit drives the processing pipeline and is designed to make sure that all of the cores are kept busy with information. The front end works with each dual core unit to allocate threads to individual cores. AMD made significant changes that include decoupled predict and fetch pipelines, as well as prediction-directed instruction prefetchers.\u00a0 It also means that Bulldozer’s pipeline is longer.<\/p>\n Each Core is equipped with a 16 KB Level 1 Data cache, a 32-entry fully associative DATA TLB, and a fully out of order load\/store \u2013 capable of two 128-bit loads per cycle or one 128-bit store per cycle. Each dual-core module includes a 2 MB 16-way unified L2 cache with an L2 TLB capable of 124 entry, 8 way that services both instruction and data requests.\u00a0 Bulldozer supports up to 23 outstanding L2 cache misses for memory system concurrency.<\/p>\n One impressive new feature that appears to work well in practice is AMD’s Turbo Core technology.\u00a0 It is far more sophisticated than similar technology used in their 6-core Phenom IIs.\u00a0 It allows for the FX-8150 to increase from 3.6GHz to 3.9GHz across all eight cores, and a further double-boost on 4 cores to 4.2GHz if TDP headroom allows it.\u00a0 Generally the boost effect can range from instantaneous to over a longer period, depending on the thermal situation.<\/p>\n Of course, this could give some significant performance improvements as AMD’s internal testing shows.<\/p>\n And of course we need to look at the AM3+ chipset.<\/p>\n It all comes together looking like this at launch:<\/p>\n According to AMD, FX processors offer:<\/p>\n FX Processors:<\/strong><\/p>\n We just had a very brief overview of Bulldozer’s architecture.\u00a0 As with all CPU designs, there are compromises that make Bulldozer particularly attractive for AMD’s large server market but not so perfect for desktops, perhaps.\u00a0 We we need to look at is how the Bulldozer Flagship FX-8150 performs in applications and especially in games.\u00a0 Please read on.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This evaluation is focused on the FX-8150 in gaming. And we are going to set up a “David vs. Goliath” scenario using the more expensive Core i7 LGA 1366 platform. You can expect to pay more for a tri-channel Intel system that we are comparing as the current i7-960 runs at 3.2GHz and sells for about $300.\u00a0 Of course, a savvy gamer will more likely choose the higher-performing-in-gaming Sandy Beach i5 2500K or 2600K and overclock them over 4.0GHz.\u00a0 In this case, our 1366 LGA i7-920 overclocked to 3.8GHz with Turbo Boost will perform similarly to a stock<\/em> i5-2500 in gaming.<\/p>\n The review that we are presenting today evaluates the Bulldozer FX-8150 versus the overclocked Phenom II 980 Black Edition versus the overclocked Core i7 920. We will use the HD 6970 and HD 6970 CrossFire as our tests card because we are looking at a relatively high-end gaming system – something an enthusiast would likely pair with a Core i7 or i5 processor..<\/p>\n As in previous similar testing we will prove a point in gaming – that the video card makes the most difference as long as it is paired with a capable CPU. If you look at just about every other tech site, they compare the Intel CPUs to the Phenom IIs using low to medium details and at low to medium resolutions with 3 or 4 games – something no gamer can relate to. Instead, let’s give you practical<\/em> gaming results at resolutions you play at – beginning with 1920×1200 resolution which 1080p gamers can also completely relate to. And let’s use twenty (20) modern games to give you a good feel for what to expect from our 3 test CPU platforms.<\/p>\n We need to know if the new Bulldozer can give similar performance to a high-end CPU platform with fast graphics and at high resolutions. Using our HD 6970 and HD 6970 CrossFire should be similar performance-wise to using either a GTX 570 or GTX 570 SLI; something an enthusiast might well pair with either Core i7 or a Phenom II processor. We want to see if the AMD FX platform suffers practically in gaming when compared to Intel’s solution and how well it does compared to the overclocked Phenom II.<\/p>\n We had very little time to spend testing our CPUs and HD 6970s.\u00a0 In fact, we had such poor scaling with CrossFire on the AM3+ platform, we suspect driver issues.\u00a0 In our follow-up Bulldozer article, we will also set up Nvidia video cards and test our FX-8150 with even more powerful graphics – GTX 580, GTX 580 SLI and HD 6970-X3 TriFire.<\/p>\n Our FX-8150 overclocked easily to 4.4Ghz by upping the stock multiplier of 18 to 22 (calculate using the multiplier times the bus frequency of 200MHz to get the CPU core’s clockspeed). We added a little voltage to the core to make it completely stable at 1.4V and the\u00a0 temperatures remained nearly as cool as at the stock settings.<\/p>\n Beyond 4.4GHz we were stopped.\u00a0 We could not get 4.5GHz stable no matter how much voltage we dared to use (up to 1.55V).\u00a0 It may be an issue of using our old Thermalright UltraExtreme120, a good CPU cooler in its day.\u00a0 It still manages to get our Phenom II 980 BE from 3.7GHz to 4.3GHz, so it is at least still a decent air-cooler.\u00a0 However, for our follow-up article, we will use watercooling and a full tower case instead of the mid tower we currently use.<\/p>\n We used the BIOS to adjust our CPU overclock.\u00a0 The ASUS AM3+ CrossHair V motherboard in incredibly full-featured and an absolute joy for the overclocker to use – it is that intuitive, easy-to-use and functional!<\/p>\n[insert MB image]\n However, there is another overclocking option within Windows that is available in the (formerly-named) Catalyst Control Center\u00a0 (now called AMD VISION Engine Control Center<\/em>) that allows you to adjust the CPU core speed also:<\/p>\n To achieve 4400MHz, we also disabled Turbo Core and power management since it would not clock higher manually. Since we received our watercooling unit from AMD yesterday and since we have not yet unboxed our new Thermaltake Tower case, we will naturally do a follow-up article on the FX-8150 that will feature further overclocking.\u00a0 There is a lot more to be explored with the new processor that we have only touched on in this introduction.<\/p>\n In fact, this week we are planning to build our new AMD platform in a brand new Thermaltake Chaser MK II full-sized Tower case that is set up for watercooling – expect an evaluation of this beautiful case this month (plus a Thermaltake mechanical gaming keyboard evaluation!) as well as Part Two of the Bulldozer FX-8150 evaluation which will include Part 3 of SLI vs. CrossFire.<\/p>\n We kept an eye on power and the FX-8150 kept within its specified TDP of 125W – that is, until we overclocked it and then readings went way up.\u00a0 We will cover this thoroughly in Part Two when we get watercooling set up.<\/p>\n Please continue on to the next page for the complete hardware and software setup of our platforms \u2013 AMD\u2019s FZ-8150 versus Phenom II 980 BE versus Intel’s Core i7-920. We shall see what happens with high performance again in PC gaming with fast graphics in the Autumn of 2011.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Test Configuration – Hardware <\/strong><\/p>\n Test Configuration – Software<\/strong><\/p>\n The Benchmarks<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n The Synthetic and Real World Tests<\/p>\n The Game benchmarks<\/p>\n We have got an interesting project going. First we look at synthetic and real world benches before we head for gaming results.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n HD Tune<\/strong> is a hard disk utility but it may give us some differences between the AMD AM3+ platform and Intel’s X58 motherboards. We are using the default setting of 64KB blocks for testing. First we run the standard benchmark with the Core i7-920 and the x58 MB.<\/p>\n Now we run the benchmark for the Phenom II and AM3+ motherboard; the minimum speeds are way down; something choked during the test. There is nothing conclusive here.\u00a0 It will be interesting to rerun the HDD tests with a SSD.<\/p>\n The ATTO Disk Benchmark is an aging performance measurement tool which measures storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize the performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I\/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Here are the results of the Core i7-920\/X58 platform benchmark.<\/p>\n Next the same benchmark in the same PC and identical conditions with the Phenom II\/AM3+ motherboard.<\/p>\n It doesn’t really prove anything, but synthetic benchmarks are a little faster on the AM3+ platform with Phenom II. Let’s see if it holds for the FX 8150:<\/p>\n Well, we do see a higher transfer rate with the AM3+ motherboard even though the hard disks are identical 500GB Seagate drives.\u00a0 Again, it will be interesting to see results between X58 and AM3+ using a Solid State Drive (SSD).<\/p>\n We didn’t run Super Pi on Core i7 so here it is on the Phenom II.<\/p>\n And now the FX-8150<\/p>\n Phenom II is stronger in this bench.\u00a0 We will see this over and over.\u00a0 Unless an application is heavily-threaded or optimized, it will run faster on the Phenom II (nevermind the i5 or i7 which is faster than the Phenom II).\u00a0 We notice a trend of lower IPC with FX that AMD is trying to make up with more cores and increased clockspeed.\u00a0 Did they succeed?\u00a0 Continue on to Fritz Chess Bench.<\/p>\n Fritz Chess Benchmark is found within the game’s program files and basically it crunches numbers to test your processor’s speed.\u00a0 Deep Fritz takes advantage of massive calculations and multi-threaded performance to work any CPU fully. It loads all threads 100% and will drive your CPU temperatures way up.<\/p>\n Besides showing relative speed when compared to a P3 1.0GHz CPU, it also shows the nodes completed.\u00a0 The faster your CPU, the more nodes completed.\u00a0 First up is the i7<\/p>\n Next the Phenom II<\/p>\n Finally the FX-8150<\/p>\n The FX-8150 is faster than the Phenom II but still lags behind the Core i7.<\/p>\n CustomPC benchmark use widely available open-source applications to carry out the tasks that most of us perform on a regular basis. There are three tests, each of which measure different aspects of a PC\u2019s performance. These tests themselves are not synthetic benchmarks but instead they use real world image, video and multi-tasking tasks to test the performance of your computer.<\/p>\n The tests are:<\/p>\n As usual we test with the Core i7-920 first.<\/p>\n Now the same test is repeated on the Phenom II 980 BE and it is much slower. <\/p>\n Finally we test the FX-8150.<\/p>\n The Phenom II partly by virtue of being +100MHz faster, scores slightly better than the FX-8150. It cannot be denied that the new Bulldozer architecture is a bit weaker for single-threaded applications than even the Phenom II architecture is.\u00a0 Clearly the Core i7-920 at 3.8GHz is easily much faster in image editing and video encoding where the applications are not heavily multi-threaded. Even the multi-tasking test is solidly in favor of the Intel architecture.<\/p>\n CINEBENCH is based on MAXON’s professional 3D content creation suite, CINEMA 4D. This latest 11.5 version of CINEBENCH can test up to 64 processor threads accurately and automatically.<\/p>\n First up, the Core i7 with a rather shortened CPU test.\u00a0 (We will update this)<\/em><\/p>\n Next up the Phenom II which got a lot more detailed testing. The i7 is significantly faster in the CPU test than the Phenom II.<\/p>\n And now the FX-8150<\/p>\n In some ways, FX architecture has improved over the Phenom II architecture except for single core IPC, but it still lags behind Intel’s older Core i7\/X58 platform.\u00a0 Again we see FX improvements for heavily-threaded applications but a decline in single-threaded performance from Phenom II.<\/p>\n We ran this bench quite late in out testing and only managed to see if the FX 8150 had bettered the overclocked Phenom II 980 BE.\u00a0 Basically this test encodes a HD video clip into a x264 video file. The first pass is very quick and the second one is much slower and much more demanding of a task as it does the actual encoding.\u00a0 This benchmark is heavily mult-threaded and should favor the new architecture.<\/p>\n Faster is better and first up is the Phenom II 980 BE.<\/p>\n Next up,\u00a0 the FX-8150.<\/p>\n As we can see, although the first pass is quicker on the Phenom II, it is far more important to have the second pass encode quickly as it is far more time-consuming.\u00a0 The first pass simply calculates and doesn’t even use 4 cores whereas the second pass will use all eight for the actual encoding.\u00a0 Finally a solid win for FX over Phenom II in a heavily-multi-threaded task.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n PCMark Vantage<\/strong> The HDD Test suite in PCMark Vantage consists of the following 8 tests:<\/p>\n First we run the standard PCMark Vantage benchmark suite using our Core i7-920 and note that it scores the lowest overall.<\/p>\n Now we run the same benchmark suite with our Phenom II 980 Black edition and we see right away that it scores 500 points higher.<\/p>\n In all cases, the FX 8150 is faster with PCMark Vantage than with the other platforms.\u00a0 You may look over the individual scores to see the strengths and weaknesses of each processor and platform.<\/p>\n [insert summary chart]\n And now on to SANDRA, another comprehensive benching suite.<\/p>\n SANDRA, short for the S<\/strong>ystem AN<\/strong>alyser, D<\/strong>iagnostic and R<\/strong>eporting A<\/strong>ssistant is an information and diagnostic utility. It provides a tremendous amount of information about every hardware and software component in your PC. It also provides various benchmarks including for measuring and reporting disk performance. SANDRA 2011<\/a> Service Pack 5 is already out and it has a lot of new functionality for the new APUs and the FX processors.<\/p>\n Aggregate Arithmetic Performance<\/strong> (GOPS)<\/p>\n First up is the Core i7 920 and we see the GOPS is made up of several scores followed by a very detailed analysis.<\/p>\n<\/a>We notice that FX 8150 is positioned against Intel’s enthusiast CPU line-up and directly against the upper-midrange Core i5 2500K. Considering that AMD is introducing their new flagship processor at $245, we can expect that its performance should be between the 2500K and 2600K.<\/p>\n<\/a>AMD is releasing seven CPUs simultaneously and they are available globally later on today in quantity – from the lowest-priced 4-core FX 4100 for $115, to the the 6-core FX 6100 for $165; as well as the flagship 8-core FX 8150 for $245 and the FX 8120 which is also 8-core for $205 as shown in the table below:<\/p>\n<\/a>Below is the Bulldozer family without the pricing but with more details of their differences. As you can see, the L3 cache remains the same as well as 1866MHz DDR support and all FX processors will use the AM3+ motherboard platform.\u00a0 It is likely that older AM3 motherboards will support these new FX CPUs with a BIOS update, so it is an upgrade path for older Phenom IIs.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nThe Bulldozer Architecture<\/h3>\n
AMD’s Bulldozer versus Intel’s Sandy Bridge<\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n\u201cBulldozer\u201d Front End<\/h3>\n
<\/a>A Prediction Queue manages direct and indirect branches that are fed with a L1 and L2 Branch Target Buffer which stores destination addresses. Bulldozer’s modules can each decode up to 4 instructions per cycle versus 3 on AMD Phenom II processors.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nThe prediction pipeline produces a sequence of fetch addresses. The Fetch pipeline does a look up in the instruction cache, and pulls 32 bytes per cycle into the fetch queue which feeds the decoders.<\/p>\n<\/a>Bulldozer uses a physical register file (PRF) which is a single location that holds the register results of executed instructions. This reduces power by eliminating unnecessary data movement and data replication by keeping one copy instead of broadcasting the data.<\/p>\nCaches<\/h3>\n
<\/a>
\nFinally AMD has designed a shared 8 MB L3 cache with 64 way associativity for both cores in a each module.\u00a0 And Bulldozer is planned for use in both the desktop and server areas.<\/p>\n<\/a>AMD also redesigned the Northbridge<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nTurbo Core<\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>The Results of the changes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n
Specifications:<\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nBulldozer FX vs. Phenom II vs. Intel Core i7 in gaming<\/em><\/h3>\n
Overclocking<\/h3>\n
<\/a>Naturally we settled on the “free” +600MHz over stock (+200MHz over the extended 4-core Turbo Core mode) and we ran our benches at 4.4GHz as well as at the stock speeds to give you an idea of the framerate increase from increasing the core speed. Just remember that most games will not use more than 4 cores and you will only get +200 more MHz over the automatic turbo mode – even if the boost is for an instant.<\/p>\n
\nHere is CPU-Z information about the FX-8150 at\u00a0 idle and we can see power savings at work.<\/p>\n<\/a>AMD sent us a very nice watercooling unit that will be available with the FX-8150 as a bundle that may cost around $100 more. Here is a picture of it.<\/p>\n[insert pic]\n<\/a><\/p>\nPower Draw<\/h3>\n
Test Configuration<\/h3>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
OtherBenchmarks<\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n
\n
Synthetic Tests<\/strong><\/h1>\n
HD Tune 2.55<\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>Now we look at the FX-8150 in the same AM3+ motherboard as the Phenom II.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nATTO<\/strong><\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nSuper Pi<\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nFritz Chess Bench<\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nCustomPC Benchmark<\/strong><\/h3>\n
\n
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nCINEBENCH<\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nX264<\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nThe Benchmark Suites – PC Mark and SANDRA<\/h3>\n
\nPCMark Vantage is a PC benchmark suite designed for Windows Vista and 7 that offers one-click simplicity for casual users and detailed, professional grade testing for industry, press and enthusiasts. A PCMark Vantage score is a rough measure of a computer\u2019s performance across a variety of common tasks. We have used this bench for 3 three years and will soon be upgrading to PC Mark’s latest suite, PCMark 7.\u00a0 As an interesting note, AMD expects Windows 8 to be far more optimized in scheduling for Bulldozer architecture than Windows 7 currently is.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n\n
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>Finally we run the same benchmark suite with our FX-8150 and see that it is rated higher overall than either of its two competing platforms.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nSANDRA 2011 SP5<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n
![](\"http:\/\/i2.wp.com\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/Sandra-Arith-i71.jpg\"){kind=link}