AMD Bulldozer FX – Left Behind (review and benchmarks)

AMD – Left Behind

For those of you who understand the world of processors and technology I hope you will agree with this, that AMD’s Bulldozer platform is another failed attempt to take down Intel’s infamous i7 platform. I myself own an i7, and its amazingly fast. AMD was often chosen by budget pc builders since it was more economical, and cheaper than Intel, but this year AMD tried to “Bulldoze the i7’s” with it’s new FX (Bulldozer) line. However they failed, quite badly in fact, in some cases their old processors can beat their new ones.

The news is grim, not only has AMD failed to beat Intel’s best processor the i7-2600K (soon to be bested by the 6 Core version of the Sandy Bridge processors, Already Released, however not available at the time this article was written) it even fails to beat the cheaper i5 processors from Intel, and that’s not good. Would you rather buy something better for less, or would you go with what costs more and fails to perform? This is how most people will look at the Bulldozer processors when they see them on store shelves (already on sale since OCT 12). I will now explain why in general (overall performance) the AMD FX 8150 is set to compete with Intel’s similarly priced i5-2500K, since it can’t compete with the i7’s. Here are some of the benchmarks:

Multi Media test

Here is a test for the threading of the processor, to summarize what this means, this graph shows how well a processor threads in certain apps, or how well it performs under the given set of conditions. Here we can see the FX being beaten by all of its competitors including the previous generation it was set out to replace.

Here we see a bit more muscle from the FX processor when it is run through an encryption benchmark, this benchmark tests how fast a processor can encrypt, and decrypt files. This benchmark shows AMD improving in some areas, but still not able to match the i7.

Now to see how the new processors perform in gaming, this is important to me when I buy a processor because I enjoy playing games. The other tests were tests that show processor power, or how fast they perform in applications, here are some tests that show performance in a real world situation. The previous benchmarks are not very important to gamers, however I included them so you could see how the FX’s fall behind.

Here you can see the FX falling behind the i5, even the 2400 which is significantly cheaper. The FX 8150 matches the old X6, so not much improvement.

When people say, “don’t judge things by their label”, well with processors it’s more like, “don’t judge a processor by its clock speed”, for example “3.06ghz”. However this is because judging a processor by its clock speed is wrong, that number just gives you the speed of a processor, however it does not necessarily mean it is better than others. To give you an example, the AMD FX 8150 has a clock speed that is faster than the one of the i7-2600k, however it still trails far behind the i7 in many benchmarks. Speed is not everything so don’t be fooled, AMD is already behind performance wise, not to mention Intel released their new 6 core i7’s, so AMD does not stand a chance. The Bulldozer Fx processors although they generated a lot of hype did not match up against the competition. It’s more like Intel bulldozed AMD. With AMD falling behind in the processor market what will happen when NVidia releases their Kepler cards, so far AMD is not to far behind in the GPU business, they offer good performance per dollar, they go head to head with Nvidia. Hopefully we will see how AMD responds to the Kepler cards that will be released hopefully later this year, or in early to mid-2012.

Maybe next year we will see some improvement with their to be released code named “Piledriver” processor, or the year after that with the “Steamroller” line, or in three years with the “Excavator”, all I know is ever since Intel started with their quad core line AMD has fallen behind, and their naming strategy isn’t doing them well either, they decided to name their new processors after construction equipment.

UPDATE (Dec 27): These results are using Windows 7, it is possible that Windows 8 will provide better results due to possible better support for multi core processors, and threading.

*NOTE: Prices may have changed since the publication of this article, they are still subject to change.

The pictures for benchmarks above are not mine; they have been taken from Anandtech.com