Hardware AMD FX-8150 Review

Ok..so..I think it's valid to reason that whatever market share AMD had in the desktop sector is going to decline and then some. Alrighty then; so, how does AMD recover? I mean, they are going to lose "big-time" over the next few quarters. Piledriver you say? By then Sandy Bridge Exteme and Ivy Bridge will be dominating the market and with many loyal AMD customers stating they are switching platforms, this might be the end of AMDs presence in the desktop sector. The most surprising thing about this demise is Intel had nothing to do with it; after all, it was AMDs FX product that delivered the final blow and sent it crashing to the mat. No way I saw this coming...

 

SERIOUSLY!!! The power consumption is just outrageous!!! WOWOWOWOOWW...imagine if Bulldozer sold like mad...we'd have power grid failures across the world!! Nuclear power plants exploding at unamiganble rates; the world in utter chaos!! Miami Heat wining an NBA championsip and all because AMD produced a fat, out-of-shape, lazy processor that does nothing but talk-the-talk, yet can't walk-the-walk. LOL...OK...I just needed to vent...I'm obviously dissapointed. I'm not a fan boy of either company, but I do love my Sandy Bridge A-LOT more now.

 

I doubt if the 6 core will be better AMD will probably go the same router as they have with the Phenoms and just disable two cores. It might over clock a bit better with less load on the die but will basically be 25 less CPU. But it may have the option to be unlocked like the Phenoms which could make it a bit of a bargain. The quad core on the other hand, if it is a true quad could be a serious overclocker and prove to be quite useful. Just my take on what could possibly happen.

Then we still have Pile driver to come next year..

whats next..hydraulic crane???

 

Seems shareholders are unaware of the general consensus. AMD Stock is up 3.91% and rising. Of course, that's the general trend when a new product is released.

 

It'll be interesting to see what the share price does when they get early sales figures. To be honest I'm expecting Llano to be a much better seller for AMD in the consumer market than Bulldozer. Those things have had good reviews.

 

That probably takes into account the fact that it is a brand new product and probably loads ahve been pre-sold to go in to desk tops that will end up in PC world and places like that. On the other hand to the more tech savvy ( thats us I think) the bench marks don't make good reading. But AMD will have know this already and now it seems that they are barking on about it being optimized for Windows 8, which is of no use to us right now as it's still at least a year away.

 

Exactly! Excellent point! A year from now there will be much better offerings from Intel that will dwarf AMD's future top performing desktop processors codenamed "Nose-Picker," which will do really well in Windows 9. LOL!!!

 

Enthusiasts like us make up a rather small part of the CPU market, so a poor reception probably doesn't carry much/any weight with shareholders.

On the other hand actually launching a new product when they say they will is likely to carry quite a bit of weight.

For a real drop in the shares because of the chip I think it would probably need to see terrible sales in the business market, to the point that there market share shrinks noticeably but we won't know that for months yet.

 

FX-4100 will be a good opponent of Pentium G620, while FX-8150 is a good opponent of i5-2300. Except the heat. And price .

 

Well, glad I'm not an upgrade freak and stood by my AM2+ pc.
I was really eager and hoping for Bulldozer to be something special, it came out special the other way round ...
I was already preparing myself for when I will be needing to upgrade I will move to Intel since the i5 2500k is such a wonder.
I always loved the performance/price ratio of AMD but I would have to be mad to think of buying one now.
Guess it's time for me to part ways with AMD and go to Intel (the last one I had was an Pentium 3 600MHz).
Sad moment for AMD in the consumer market

 

and load power consumption...and so on...

yeah, the general consumer has no idea how well it performs. i love walking through bestbuy and listening to the reps sell pc's...

 

TBH the rumblings around the interwebs prepared me for this tho its worse and better than what I thought. While it performed well in the right conditions (and very well too) Single thread I would of hoped to be better than phenom ii and tbh it seems like a waste of resources on R&D and marketing. Why not rehash the phenom architecture and actually improve IPC a tiny bit, reduce power further and bolt on another 2 cores and produced the same result!! It seems a step backwards using the longer pipeline which Intel abandoned it for a reason.

Least Llano has a future if this doesn't cause the company to go belly up.

 

If I remember the AMD slides correctly, their roadmap says that it goes Bulldozer -> Piledriver -> Excavator.

 

Brother, you aint lieing! Once upon a time, I went their (BB) to purchase an entry level video card for a client. The Geek squad member was just harrassing me to purchase a GTX260 claiming it was the best video card on the market; this, after Fermi was a few months in the market! By the time he noticed I was wearing an EVGA GTX470 t-shirt that I got for free from EVGA for buying a GTX470, he had already gone through all of his "BS" in trying to sell me an obselete video card. Once he noticed the EVGA logo, he just walked away. Therefore, I think you made a valid point in that the general consumer have no idea how well it (Bulldozer) performs and should do well at major retail stores like BB. Plus, to the average consumer, 8 cores sounds a lot better than 4 or even 6 cores. You know what I mean?

 

I think it was Bulldozer, Nosepicker, and finally Tombstone.

 

What a disappointment. But I think that those men who use 3D Max should be happy.
But upcoming LGA 2011? I Think its going to crush Bulldozer.
Anyway i got I5 2500k and I am happy with taht. But all the great stories about the Bulldozer around just so funny

 

I still don't understand why the single threaded performance is so poor...

Image Editing Benchmark, both at 3.6GHz;

AMD FX-8150 (£205, Q3 2011) = 887
AMD PII X3 720 (£90, Q1 2009) = 1125

Also, my motherboard and RAM suck compared to the test kit used in this review (DDR2 RAM, for example).

... what? Two and a half years later and AMD brings out a CPU that is 20% slower clock for clock, despite being over double the price.

It sucks even more when you consider that overclocked to 4.8GHz (!!!) the FX-8150 still fails to beat my bargain-bin CPU @3.6GHz: it's still behind by 5%.

Did AMD not realise at some point in the design/testing stages that their new architecture is slower than the old one?

You can go buy the A8-3850 for a smidge over £100 and even THAT beats the FX in the single threaded benchmark...

Really who is going to buy this?

/rant

 

Exactly, "who is going to buy this?" Plus, to add to your discussion, from what I've gathered, I think AMD wasn't ready to release this generation (Bulldozer) to the desktop segment. I think that they were so far behind that if they didn't release the desktop CPU it would have some sort of negative effect on their stock prices the following quarter. It reminds me of what happend with Nvidia's Fermi. Therefore, AMD was more motivated to reach there "paper" goals, even if that meant releasing a product prematurely; oppose to releasing a product that was fully ready. From what I see, it seems like Bulldozer was about halfway in its R&D stage.

 

The worst part is it shoots all the upgrade paths in the foot. It's new chip and mobo time for me when I get round to it, but by then, 2500k will be late to my party anyway.

 

If i read rightly that it has a longer pipeline, then if it doesn't predict the next number it fails Big time (similar to the netburst architecture).
These next few sentances are very correct me if i'm wrong, but with CPU development doesn't it take quite a while to build up from scratch? So if i'm guessing right it is about 5 years or so, which is when Intel still had netburst, if AMD took the long pipeline approach that would give them very high clockspeeds and well optimised performance, but shocking for everything else.

I think i can remember a slide about how due to netburst having such a long pipline that in a worst case scenario a 3ghz cpu actually performed at the equivalent of a 1.8ghz due to wrong predicitons. Or in normal cases about 20-30% slower, hence why you get similar results with a less powerfull cpu.