Bulldozer Arrives: AMD FX-8150 Review

How We Tested & Bandwidth

AMD AM3+ Test System Specs
- AMD Phenom II X6 1100T (3.30GHz)
- AMD Phenom II X4 980 (3.70GHz)
- AMD FX-8150 (3.60GHz)
- AMD FX-8120 (3.10GHz)
- AMD FX-6100 (3.30GHz)
- AMD FX-4170 (4.20GHz)
- x2 4GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-14900 (CAS 8-9-8-24)
- Asrock Fatal1ty 990FX Professional (AMD 990FX)
- OCZ ZX Series 1250w
- Crucial m4 256GB (SATA 6Gb/s)
- Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 SOC (1536MB)
Software
- Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit
- Nvidia Forceware 285.38

Intel LGA1155 Test System Specs
- Intel Core i7-2600K
- Intel Core i5-2500K
- x2 4GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-14900 (CAS 8-9-8-24)
- Gigabyte G1.Sniper2 (Intel Z68)
- OCZ ZX Series 1250w
- Crucial m4 256GB (SATA 6Gb/s)
- Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 SOC (1536MB)
- Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit
- Nvidia Forceware 285.38

Intel LGA1366 Test System Specs
- Intel Core i7-975 Extreme Edition (3.33GHz)
- Intel Core i7-920 (2.66GHz)
- x3 2GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-12800 (CAS 8-8-8-20)
- Gigabyte G1.Sniper (Intel X58)
- OCZ ZX Series 1250w
- Crucial m4 256GB (SATA 6Gb/s)
- Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 SOC (1536MB)
Software
- Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit
- Nvidia Forceware 285.38

Intel LGA1156 Test System Specs
- Intel Core i5-750
- x2 4GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-12800 (CAS 8-8-8-20)
- Gigabyte P55A-UD7 (Intel P55)
- OCZ ZX Series 1250w
- Crucial m4 256GB (SATA 6Gb/s)
- Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 SOC (1536MB)
- Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit
- Nvidia Forceware 285.38

Compared to the Phenom II, AMD's FX processors provide significantly more memory bandwidth. Read throughput has been increased by roughly 60%, while write performance is almost 40% better. Although the bandwidth performance has been improved greatly, it's still considerably slower than Intel's Sandy Bridge processors.

The L2 cache performance has also been improved -- at least when looking at the Phenom II range. The FX-8150 delivered 30% more read throughput than the Phenom II X6 1100T, though the write performance was slightly slower. As with the previous chart, Bulldozer just can't match Sandy Bridge's L2 cache performance.