review AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer CPU Review

quote EdwardTheBard

While it's price is competitive to 2500K the point remains that a cpu with double the "cores" 2500K has, delivers similar-to-+25% performance.

The sad thing is that Intel 2600k uses ~2/3 the die size of bulldozer (And that's including gpu), 1/2 the transistors, and lower clocks to beat it in most tests. AMD might have gotten the performance/watt right and multi-core efficiency in tests that can use it, but it might as well be their Pentium 4 in every other respect.

quote flame_boi13

Well lets look at the bright side. Finally, computer users who buy 1000w+ PSU, this is your chance for a CPU that that allows you to show off the true power of your PSU.

The i7 920 and up were usually just as bad or even worse with power after OC'ing past about 3.6ghz. Granted they're probably still faster at those clocks of course.

I'd really like AMD to go after performance/die space as they do with the graphics card lineup. If they could optimize the x86 cores as well as they do their shader clusters per die space they would at least make a little more money off of their underperforming cpu's instead of trying to be competitive with a much smaller die sandybridge that beats it in performance. Of course I imagine it's at least a little harder to design an x86 core over tacking on more shaders, rops, texture units, and a new UVD every now and then.

The bulldozer CPU design is very intriguing and creative with all the new design ideas that it uses but at the end of the day it comes down to whether it can perform or not, and on this... well, you've seen the benchmarks. Seems we're back to the days of the original phenom x4's, decent enough for most things, uses more power, larger die size, not competitive in the high end.

Here's to hoping they get their asses in gear.