AMD FX ”Bulldozer” processor in early benches

AMD FX series will be the first processors to appear sporting AMD’s new Bulldozer architecture. While waiting for the postponed launch benchmarks have now appeared with what is claimed to be a sample of AMD FX-8130P, the top model of the series. The result are of a mixed nature, but do show promise.

Bulldozer is the first all fresh processor architecture from AMD in many years. The first circuits of the AMD FX series are code-named Zambezi and will sport 4, 6 or 8 cores. The exact clock frequencies are unknown at this date, but the benchmarks that have been published do show that things are on the right track.

The sample of AMD FX-8130P that took a spin at Turkish website Donanimhaber works at 3.2 GHz, but can go into Turbo Core at 3.6 GHz when using all 8 cores, or 4.2 GHz with four cores active. The processor is said to be B1 stepping and may very well operate at other frequencies at launch and some optimized performance, but the numbers presented should, if genuine, offer a hint of what Bulldozer has to offer.

The benchmarks were run on a Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5 motherboard with a GeForce GTX 580 graphics card. The results have been summarized by VR-Zone and indicates that Bulldozer should be competitive with Intel’s Sandy Bridge architecture in several ways.

3DMark11 is one of the stronger results where it reaches P6265, which is better than most Core i7-2600K that should land around P6000.

Also in Fritz Chess Bulldozer once again impress and gets 14196 points, above 2600K but below Intel’s hexa-core Gulftown processor that should land around 18000-19000 points. We see the same thing in Cinebench R10 where Bulldozer ends up in between 2600K and Core i7-990X.

The memory performance of Bulldozer is way improved since AMD K10.5 and Phenom II. Not the least when reading data and access times are better.

x264 Benchmark is one of the benchmarks we have our own numbers to compare with and also here Bulldozer show good tendencies. It doesn’t quite reach up in pass 1, but in pass 2 we see Intel Core i7-2500K gets beaten big time.

The tests that look less impressive are SuperPi, where Intel has always been strong, and PCMark 7. Here it gets a surprisingly low score of 3045, which is even worse than AMD A8-3850. Not to mention miles from Intel’s Sandy Bridge processors.

Last but not least Donanimhaber claims its system with AMD FX-8130P consumed the same amount of power as Core i7-2600K during idle (97 watt with GTX 580) and 10 watt less during load. This with a specified TDP of 125 watt.

There have been rumors of AMD having some problems with performane of the Bulldozer architecture and the results published by Donanimhaber does show irregular behavior . It says that the B1 samples have some problems with the L3 cache, which could explain the performance in PCMark 7.

The launch of AMD FX is slated for August or September and the processors are comaptible with the latest AM3+ motherboards, specifically those based on the AMD 9 series.

Source: DonanimHaber via VR-Zone

OBS! The diagrams in the article are based on NordicHardwares test data, and Donanimhaber’s scores with AMD FX-8130P. We cannot verify these results, but have included them for comparison. For being an early B1 stepping the results could be vastly different from the retail versions.