Bulldozer: The Aftermath

Since all the official benchmarks have now been released, we know about how Bulldozer has been competing. Unfortunately, it's not great.
After all this time it's still having to compete with the i5 2500k, sure in some places it gets ahead but it general it doesn't balance out as a great chip, the IPC is even beaten by the Phenoms, which is never a good sign. A new stepping, B3 should be coming out soon, not soon enough if you ask me.
We need to know more about this stepping to see what kind of improvements it could make, there have been claims that a registry fix is also necessary to improve Bulldozer, improvements of 40% have also been claimed, but you'd expect that such an improvement could not be entirely down to the registry.
I'm sure new benchmarks will come out with the stepping, hopefully affecting that huge power drain and the TDP, people are still buying the chip regardless of it's current problems, if there is such an improvement with this second stepping.. I wonder how those people will feel, they've been through a lot already if they're still willing to by the chip.
That's all for now, more ranting and raving at a later date.
Have a nice day.

Bulldozer took it's time.

Looks like the bulldozer modules are finally here, Zambezi has arrived.

The unfortunate point is that the benchmarks may not be as promising as previously expected, this being let down in some amount by the architecture of the chip, for even in the FX-8150 there are only four FPU schedulers, which is even less than the 1100T, the highest rated Phenom. Where the FX does begin to pull back some ground is when rendering, video compression and conversion are involved, the multiple modules and cores really having an impact on the performance.

I've been waiting all this time to see what I should build my new pc as, I expected more from the Bulldozer, considering this is the flagship chip, and to see it lose out to the i5 2500k and even the 1100T in tests isn't good. In the end it comes down to what you want to do with the chip.

Although in the future, the sound of bulldozer modules housed in an APU does sound promising, as long as they put a few more FPUs in there and keep the prices down, i'm sure we'll all be happy.

I'll be updated a lot more regularly, keep posted.

Until next time.