Hardware AMD FX-8120 review

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2012/07/27/amd-fx-8120-review/1

 

A question - did you apply both bulldozer hotfixes to windows?

 

Oh dear AMD, I'd love it if they could produce something that at least provides a bit of competition for Intel!

Nice review

 

Intel could go on holiday for 5 years, come back and still be beating AMD's new cpus.
How old is the i7 920 now?
Shame seeing the FX brand used on chips like this.

 

saw amd review and thought 'oh dear lets see what they got this time' and clicked on link. Turns out it's still poor little amd cant climb up to the tree house.

 

http://ark.intel.com/products/37147...ocessor-(8M-Cache-2_66-GHz-4_80-GTs-Intel-QPI)


3 1/2 years old

whilst at the top end AMD havent got a chance - with APU`s the roles are reversed - intel are still playing catchup to AMD


edit:

OP

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2646060

^^ First apply this bulldozer hotfix then

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2645594

^^ second hotfix to be applied

 

acurally in my country a i5 costs as much as a 8150. but i bought the 8120 because it was 50 euros cheaper. alse am3+ motherboards are more higher quality at the same price point. so i bought the saberthoot.

i also want to learn parallel programming so i could check how it scales at more cores. my previeus cpu was a athlon 6000+ so it feels like an upgrade.

but i will upgrade again when ddr4 is out en when descent APU's are on the market.

 

FX 55, what a CPU that was.

They need to recruit some new engineers me thinks.

 

It's not the engineers. AMD is using artificially generated CPU Silicon designs, not the original Hand-designed, carefully planned pathways that wound up more efficient and smaller. Which is letting them down in some areas.

So; I suppose it is the engineers, or at least; the lack of them, which is causing issues like this.

Bulldozer's Ridiculously long development cycle didn't help the chip. Considering AMD had to take a shot at the future from, what? Six years ago? They've not falling that far off the mark.

I'm amazed that, for once, A reviewer didn't get a chip that'd do crazy things, though. I can hit 5ghz on this chip. Albiet; not 100% stably. 4.8-4.9 seems to be the ceiling, so far as I've tested.

I'm never going to hear the end of this review, though. I could break out in the usual "Oh! Cinebench is optimized for Intel chips!" and all that crap, but it wouldn't change the other results. What really ruins the performance in things like the Image Editing is probably the memory speeds. Even the i3 2100 is capable of achieving higher memory bandwidth than the FX 8120.

 

http://www.insideris.com/amd-spreads-propaganda-ex-employee-speaks-out/

that italic parts are from 2010 - and the article i linked to is from 2011!

 

Intel start to develop their chips 10 years in advance. But you also have to consider that the bulldozer chips were made under a time of uncertainty at AMD with new (was it new CEOs like every month or something because the share holders weren't happy?).

What I don't understand is how inefficient the bulldozer chips are. 579W @4.65GHz for a chip far from the performance of a i7 920 @4GHz which draws 411W.

 

AMD made some weird design choices. Follow this link for a comparison of the X6 1100, X4 980 and FX 8150. The L1 data cache size is smaller on the new FX for a start. (16k vs 64k)
AMD has also gone for massive 64-way associativity on the FXs L3 Cache. Associativity reduces cache misses, but increases cache latency. Ivy's L1 and L2 cache is 8-way and L3 is 16-way, which appears to be a better compromise (FX 8150 has 4-way L1 data, 2-way L1-instruction and 16-way L2 data).

Overall, Intel's cache design seems to be simpler and more effective. I think this is one of the main issues Bulldozer has besides the memory controller.

 

Will be interesting to see, if AMD can make a dual core processor with 4 or 5 GHZ stock speed without any overclocking. Because i'll be the first one to buy it.

 

Still only a Quad Core with some fancy new Hyper Threading thrown in.

Dishonest marketing from AMD.

 

Why do they even bother?

 

well if they didnt your fancy new ivy bridge i5 replacement would start at £500 and head upwards.....

 

Their biggest mistake AMD made was to make these new cpu's for a new socket. Instead they could have used it on the AM3 (non plus) and a lot of customers would have bought it as replacement.

 

AMD's stuff has certainly been a bit hit and miss over the years and desperately feel the need to upgrade as I am still using an AMD 64 X2 6000+ CPU on the AM2 socket with a mere 2GB ram and a Radeon HD6850 graphics card under XP.

I had thought of going with AMD's FM1 socket and the Athlon II X4 651K Black Edition CPU til I realised that the FM1 socket is already obsolete and would leave no future upgrade path and simply can't afford the extra layout for an Intel i3 2100 let alone an i5 2400.

Soo frustrating...

 

Not entirely. Some parts of it are completely doubled. It's more like 1.7 cores per module. It's just the Integer units aren't doubled, which means Bulldozer Tanks in any mathematical tests that stress more than four cores.

Chip production issues. This current batch are very, very badly produced. Bulldozer would have been much better if it didn't have this much in the way of silicon leakage. The new Stepping AMD is planning to roll out at some point (Although I'm not sure if that's been canned in favour of Piledriver) is said not to have as bad a case of these issues, but I don't hold much hope.

I'm committed now, with the amount of money i've sunk into this, and I will fight tooth and nail to prove that it's not crap, but I'm never, ever going to claim it's the best, or anywhere near.

 

There is no B3 stepping of Bulldozer coming. The next version will be the piledriver version.