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We tested the Bulldozer: FX-8150 and three 990FX motherboards on the test bench

We tested the Bulldozer: FX-8150 and three 990FX motherboards on the test bench

We tested the Bulldozer: FX-8150 and three 990FX motherboards on the test bench

Introduction

June 1999, 23 A nice, quiet, simple summer day, but a significant point for a processor company in Sunnyvale. It was around this time that the AMD K7, or AMD Athlon’s seventh generation x86 processors, was introduced. We would only report one data on this: 12 years, 3 months and 19 days. The wrinkled variants of the K7 architecture have been dominant for so long and so much has had to wait for AMD’s next big throw. Apparently, towards the end of this period, the company’s smile wasn’t sincere, but at the same time it is a good example of how long the life of a well-managed processor architecture can be extended.

AMD_Athlon_XP_2800_Barton_FSB333 _-_ haut
The glorious past [+]

In recent years, AMD's biggest problem has been that chips with a significantly larger silicon area have to be sold at a lower price than the competition, which is an acceptable solution in the short term, but has a strong impact on expected profits in the longer term. Aware of this, the engineers began developing the Bulldozer microarchitecture roughly 4-5 years ago. Although the floor area of ​​the technologically leading FX CPUs is still relatively large - the official figure is 315 square millimeters - the Intel Sandy Bridge-E chip has far surpassed even this. The transistor density of the chip is quite high, the chip contains just over two billion transistors!

Orochi-Die-2M
[+]

An interesting development took place during the birth of this article. PC Games Hardware vented that Orochi chip-based server processors contained “only” 1,2 billion transistors. Nothing explains the huge difference, that is, though. AMD originally advertised a bad value for the Bulldozer architecture. In fact, he only reported an approximate value, yet it is obvious that he could not have been so wrong. In recent times, such a well-functioning marketing machine has stalled for the second time. Earlier this year, there was even news that the new FX processors would also squeeze the Core i7-980X. Even a “random mistake” supports how prepared they were to grind the six-core cannon.

such_were
Such was… [+]

this is how it turned out
… And so it became [+]

On the day of the launch, the company usually launched the new series with a visual video. In addition to head-to-head with Intel’s flagship Core i7-980X and Cinebench R11.5, there’s even a significant advantage over AMD. The rival’s solution scored 5,41 points while the FX-8150 climbed to 5,98 points. The skew is obvious to the open eye. After the hype after the launch subsided, the video became obsolete, but after a little fix, it reappeared on the processor manufacturer’s Youtube channel. The score remained at 5,41, but this is now achieved by the Intel Core i5 2500K.

amd_bulldozer_trustee

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