AMD’s FX-8150 and CrossFire Scaling – Bulldozer Part 2, the Conclusion
Conclusion
Phenom II has reached its end of its useful life. There have been few changes to AMD’s basic architecture since about 2003. 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.
Here is AMD’s now-public roadmap:
It is clear to us that the Phenom II solution is nearing the end of it’s useful life as their quad-core flagship 980 BE overclocked to 4.3GHz was barely able to hold its own in high-resolution gaming against the three-year old Core i7-920 at 3.8GHz. We have seen AMD launch the FX-8150 at 3.6GHz, and at stock clocks – even with Turbo Core – it is fairly lackluster at gaming although it certainly holds its own against the overclocked Phenom II with a single HD 6970.
However, once graphics as fast as CrossFired HD 6970s or overclocked HD 6990 are used, it almost becomes mandatory to overclock the FX-8150 to take advantage of all of the graphics power. And the issue is that the FX-8150 draws a lot of power and creates a lot of heat to reach overclocked speeds beyond 4.2GHz. If you are the enthusiast who doesn’t mind – perhaps someone who lives in a climate that is cooler rather than warmer – this is a capable CPU and it will hold its own against other competing architectures.
Even perhaps with a lower individual IPC than with Phenom II, it now appears that AMD is again competitive in the midrange as the new bulldozer architecture is forward-looking and is something for them to build upon. They really need to get their clockspeed much higher and their TDP lower, and their roadmap indicates that they need 10 to 15% additional performance more each year just to remain competitive with Intel.
AMD’s price of $245 still seems a bit optimistic as an i5-2500K can be got for less than that, but market pricing will come into play pretty soon. If you have an AM3+ motherboard and a slower Phenom II, you should consider the FX-8150 as a gaming CPU. And we have already seen its advantages in encoding and in newer applications that take advantage of its optimizations.
We look forward to AMD’s new FX line and expect them to build upon it as the process matures and for them to reach far higher clockspeeds than they do today. We also expect that they will lower their TDP as the process matures so that eventually higher stable overclocks will not require water-cooling and large PSUs.
We also will bring you much more about the FX-8150 performance in gaming as we test further with Nvidia’s GTX 580 SLI and AMD’s HD 6970-X4 Quad-Fire. And of course, we will set up water-cooling for our FX-8150 to see what future Bulldozer performance may bring.
In the meantime, expect the latest GeForce WHQL driver performance analysis – including 3D Vision drivers; and Part 3 of CrossFire vs SLI. We just got a new Core i5-2105 from Intel and we bought an ASRock z68 Extreme3 Gen3 motherboard to evaluate versus a dual-core Phenom II in gaming! Stay tuned!
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Mark Poppin
ABT Senior Editor
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