AMD Bulldozer platform Review

If you try and recollect AMD’s standout CPUs, the only one that comes to mind is their Athlon 64 series, which back in the day ruled the PC segment. Since then, they’ve had their share of successes (if you ignore the first Phenom), but haven’t really managed to crack Intel’s success streak. Their current line of processors, the Phenom II and Athlon II offer good value for money for those on a tight budget. Honestly, the only reason you would go for a AMD-based system today is because you can’t afford Intel’s Sandy Bridge platform. As far as pure performance is concerned, be it gaming or productivity applications, Intel’s mid-high end CPUs can easily match, if not beat, AMD’s flagship offerings. Even before Bulldozer arrived, AMD had one trick up their sleeve over Intel, which was to offer more cores than competition for the same price. While this was helpful in certain multi-threaded applications, it was a very niche target, which didn’t seem to help in most of the other areas. With the arrival of Bulldozer, AMD has upped the ante by offering consumers a maximum of 8 cores for a very reasonable price. With this, they also claim performance jumps of up to 30 percent over their previous flagship offering, which was Phenom II X6 based on the Thuban core. Features Bulldozer opens a new leaf, a completely redesigned architecture from the ground up that uses Global Foundries new 32nm fabrication process. The new chips adopt the ‘FX’ brand name and are based on the new AM3+ socket for which the 990-series chipset was created. The FX line of CPUs were designed as a high-end series, so all of them come with unlocked multipliers. The new microarchitecture involves modules in which resides two integer cores. Each module gets to play with 2 MB of L2 cache, whereas there is a single pool of L3 cache shared among all the modules. For instance, the flagship FX-8150 that we’ll be testing today features four Bulldozer modules, which essentially makes it a 8-core CPU. The lower-end FX chips will also have a full 8-core Bulldozer die, but with some modules disabled. AMD did mention that they will not support core unlocking this time around. The max TDP of Bulldozer is 125W, which is same as the previous Phenom II X6. This is not bad given the fact that AMD have managed to squeeze in two more core while keeping the same TDP.

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