Wednesday, October 12th 2011
Review Consensus: AMD FX Processor 8150 Underwhelming
It's been in the works for over three years now. That's right, the first we heard of "Bulldozer" as a processor architecture under development was shortly after the launch of "Barcelona" K10 architecture. Granted, it wasn't possible to load close to 2 billion transistors on the silicon fab technology AMD had at the time, but AMD had a clear window over the last year to at least paper-launch the AMD FX. Delays and bad marketing may have cost AMD dearly in shaping up the product for the market.
After drawing a consensus from about 25 reviews (links in Today's Reviews on the front page), it emerges that:
After drawing a consensus from about 25 reviews (links in Today's Reviews on the front page), it emerges that:
- AMD FX-8150 is missing its performance expectations by a fair margin. Not to mention performance gains in its own presentation, these expectations were built up by how AMD was shaping the product to be a full-fledged enthusiast product with significant performance gains over the previous generation
- AMD ill-marketed the FX-8150. Hype is a double-edged sword, and should not be used if you're not confident your offering will live up to at least most of the hype. AMD marketed at least the top-tier FX-8000 series eight-core processors as the second coming of Athlon64 FX.
- FX-8150 launch isn't backed up by launch of other AMD FX processors. This could go on to become a blunder. The presence of other FX series processors such as the FX-8120, six-core and four-core FX processors could have at least made the price performance charts look better, given that all FX processors are unlocked, buyers could see the value in buying them to overclock. TweakTown took a closer look into this.
- There are no significant clock-for-clock improvements over even AMD's own previous generation. The FX-8150 drags its feet behind the Phenom II X6 1100T in single-threaded math benchmarks such as Super/HyperPi, the picture isn't any better with Cinebench single-threaded, either.
- Multi-threaded data streaming applications such as data compression (WINRAR, 7-ZIP) reveal the FX-8150 to catch up with competition from even the Core i7-2600K. This trend keeps up with popular video encoding benchmarks such as Handbrake and x264 HD.
- Load power draw is bad, by today's standards. It's not like AMD is lagging behind in silicon fabrication technologies, or the engineering potential that turned around AMD Radeon power consumption figures over generations.
- Price could be a major saving grace. In the end, AMD FX 8150 has an acceptable price-performance figure. At just $25 over the Core i5-2500K, the FX-8150 offers a good performance lead.
- Impressive overclocking potential. We weren't exactly in awe when AMD announced its Guinness Record-breaking overclocking feat, but reviewers across the board have noticed fairly good overclocking potential and performance scaling.
450 Comments on Review Consensus: AMD FX Processor 8150 Underwhelming
It would run colder, use lower Vcore, at the very least match the performance at same frequency, Turbo much higher than the original and vastly improve performance in certain tasks (where new instructions can be utilized).
If somebody had a cpu that outperformed my cpu in day to day functions, used less power, and did not cost $300+.... that would convince me to upgrade.
so AMD can sell the processor as cheap as possible, while get their profit from the power company,
because of that amazing load power consumption
Still I have hope that they can pull off something good with pile driver. Consumers need real competition, come on AMD!
But so glad I went sandybridge!!!!!! :p
It was obvious that this architecture wouldn't deliver the performance it was being hyped for.
Having said that, AMD is being smart by marketing the processor as a economic alternative, and this will mean more ppl will have access to multi core systems, we all know that the global economy isn't doing so well after all; it's just that as I said before, the "price-performance shock" used to hype the processor, won't be quite as dramatic as expected.
However, today we met with an FX, built on this microarchitecture, but aimed at the desktop. And let`s be honest - here is a mismatch between the hardware capabilities of the typical desktop Bulldozer and loads manifested itself in full measure.
and to be perfectly honest, other than the power users (although I am one) both of those processors are far to strong for 85% of us (or that we really need.... [the last line was my opinion not based on any fact])
still feel bad for em,
when the 2600K came out AMD should have known they were screwed comparing the 2 in internal testing but still they hyped everyone up, never trust the hype game guys.
Also, power draw in idle is better than people is talking about, its in load where trouble starts, I would try the 95w part.
I agree that shrinking thuban could have been better, but IMHO thuban has hit the limit, and we may never see a thuban beating a 2600k or Ivy Bridge after the shrink or cache increase.
What I mean is that bulldozer seems to a better design with room for improvements on the run, I think someday next year this will pay off.
On a foot note, its not a dissaster considering it was made during a period of world economical trouble.
Basically, the "fab" produces (or tries to produce) all the same chip. Like an army of star wars clone, all identical! But this is impossible...
Some yields are not perfect. The perfect ones are labeled 8150, the one that can't reach the desired frequencies are called 8120.
The ones with 2 (cough!) defective (cough!) cores are called 6100 and the half amputated parts that are left are named 4100.
I really doubt in my mind that they would purpously take a fully perfect 8150 and disable 4 of it's 8 cores just to make a quad core part.
I can not claim the above statement as fact. But it does sure looks like it.
I was expecting a wee bit better.
AMD FX-8150 – why so bad?
Apart from the idle power draw of the FX-8150 – which we’ll point once again is an excellent achievement by AMD considering that the FX-8150 is a high-performance desktop part and its rival Core i5-2500K and Core i7-2600K are both essentially power-efficient laptop processors that have been beefed up a little for desktop PCs – the results show AMD’s latest CPU to be awful at everyday, consumer applications.
It’s a lack of single-threaded performance that holds the FX-8150 back – its efforts in our single-threaded image editing test were dire compared to every other processor on test. Even worse, this supposedly 8-core CPU running at 3.6GHz was hardly much faster than a six-core Phenom II X6 1100T running at 3.3GHz in heavily multi-threaded applications that saturate all available execution cores. In Cinebench R11.5 and WPrime – applications where a 8-core CPU should dominate a 6-core (let alone a quad-core) – we saw a lack of performance.
The answer, we think, comes from Bulldozer’s history. We started this review with a brief history lesson for a reason: we really believe that Bulldozer was intended for servers and workstations, not desktop PC running consumer applications. The lack of grunt-per-core doesn’t matter too much in a server or workstation, as most professional applications are n-threaded and balance that load evenly to saturate every core available. Furthermore, it’s widely assumed that there will be an Opteron based on the Bulldozer design that incorporates eight modules, for 16 execution cores. Bulldozer, we believe, is built for massive parallelism.
www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2011/10/12/amd-fx-8150-review/13
so AMD decided to cut cost and develop a server CPU and pass it off as a PC CPU...:shadedshu
I personally think that the next line up from AMD (Piledriver) will refute my statement. However time will tell. As for me, I am disappointed with FX-8150. Where is the damn press release from AMD?!
The intel fan boys have every right to gloat, they choose the better processor.
Native DDR3-1866 Support Native DDR3-1333 Support
8 X86 Cores 4 X86 Cores
8MB L2 Cache 1MB L2 Cache
8MB L3 Cache 8 MB L3 Cache
3.6GHz Base Frequency 3.4GHz Base Frequency
4.2Ghz Base Frequency 3.8Ghz Base Frequency
+600MHz Turbo +400MHz Turbo
Advanced ISA: SSE3, SSE4.1/4.2, AES, AVX Plus FMA4, XOP Advanced ISA: SSE3, SSE4.1/4.2, AES, AVX
AMD CrossFireX™ Technology Support: 2x16 AMD CrossFireX™ Technology Support: 2x8
AMD FX all unlocked1 2 Unlocked K Parts (+$23) (P67 MB)
www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/434?vs=289
www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/434?vs=362
its release day today so prices are abit higher but still pretty good, if they drop the price £30-£40 which will deffo happen over the next month or so ,it looks very tempting indeed.
to me thats a hell of an achevement, apart from the single thread side of things.