New AMD "Bulldozer" Chip Premieres, Disappoints

[Lemur]

As a lemur who likes a good choice, this is kind of depressing. I had high hopes for the Bulldozer platform. It can barely compete with an i5? Really?

Bulldozer is an interesting architecture for sure, but I'm not sure it's quite ready for prime time. AMD clearly needed higher clocks to really make Bulldozer shine and for whatever reason it was unable to attain that. With Piledriver due out next year, boasting at least 10-15% performance gains at the core level it seems to me that AMD plans to aggressively address the shortcomings of this architecture. My only concern is whether or not a 15% improvement at the core level will be enough to close some of the gaps we've seen here today. Single threaded performance is my biggest concern, and compared to Sandy Bridge there's a good 40-50% advantage the i5 2500K enjoys over the FX-8150. [...]

I was hoping for Bulldozer to address AMD's weakness rather than continue to just focus on its strengths. I suspect this architecture will do quite well in the server space, but for client computing we may have to wait a bit longer for a more competitive part from AMD. The true culprit for Bulldozer's lackluster single-threaded performance is difficult to track down. The easy answer would seem to be clock speed. We've heard of issues at Global Foundries and perhaps Bulldozer is the latest victim. If AMD's clock targets were 30% higher than Phenom II, it simply didn't make them with the FX-8150. I've heard future derivatives will focus more on increasing IPC indepedent of process technology and clock speed, but if you asked me what was the one limit to success I would say clock speed. As a secondary factor, AMD appeared to make some tradeoffs to maintain a reasonable die size at 32nm. Even then Bulldozer can hardly be considered svelte. I suspect as AMD is able to transition to smaller transistor geometries, it will be able to address some of Bulldozer's physical shortcomings.

[Furunculus]

apparently due to the extensive use of automated design tools rather than 'hand' crafted transistor gate design.

20% slower and 20% more power hungry due to the less efficient (bigger) silicon size.

shame for now, but solid base for them to build on with many years of competitive growth to come.

no consolation for anyone hoping to build a PC today rather than ten months from now.

[naut]

I guess I'll be sticking with my AM3. My wallet is thankful. =)

[naut]

Been reading some more. Overpriced and performs averagely. Even now if you want AMD go for an AM3, better bang for buck.

AnandTech's Anand Lal Shimpi: "In lightly threaded scenarios, Bulldozer simply does not perform. To make matters worse, in some heavily threaded applications the improvement over the previous generation Phenom II X6 simply isn't enough to justify an upgrade for existing AM3+ platform owners."

HotHardware's Marco Chiapetta: "In comparison to Intel's processors, the AMD FX-8150 performed right about on par with the quad-core Core i5-2500K... Versus higher-end Intel processors like the Core i7-2600K or i7-970, however, the FX generally couldn't compete.

PC Perspective's Ryan Shrout: "In applications that are very lightly threaded the FX-8150 does the poorest as you can see in our LAME MP3 encoding, Valve synthetic tests and more. Even with a clock rate as high as 4.2GHz in those cases, the FX-8150 was unable to to keep up with the likes of the Core i7-2600k and even the Core i5-2500k."

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

Having only two choices isn't really enough.