actually performs quite well considering they used low frequency ram, it's NATIVE 1866 memory, the lower ram speed and the bottle necking from windows not addressing the cores properly hurt it more than anything, every test using the higher frequency 1866 ram competes with an I7 2600k.

not realizing i think some testers bottle necked the cpu therefore not letting it hit it's full potential in the currant setting.

I think the misconception here is that it wants and needs the 1866 Mhz ram,it needs fed as fast as you can feed it and the faster you feed it and the more you feed it the faster it gets.

Thanks for the review though the news saddens me a bit. With these chips sucking up as much power as a previous gen chip you would think the performance would be a bit better.

They should be calling the FX 8xxx series quad cores, the 6xxx series triple cores, and the 4xxx series dual cores. The bulldozer module's just do not perform good enough to call the top of the line an 8 core chip. This is just as bad when Intel made the Pentium D and called it a dual core when it was two cores on one chip using the fsb as a connector.

Im glad to see a new micro arch, but come on, it has to be competitive. All the hype and my Phenom II X4 is just about as good as it. Maybe it is time for AMD to let the garbage of ATi go. Ever since AMD bought them they have had nothing but hell meeting deadlines for their procs. It is like they bought ATi and focused hard on doing good in the vid card market and figured the stuff with the processors would just fall into place. Fusion while a nice idea and halfway practical targets the bottom of the barrel desktop market. AMD just doesnt have enough laptop market share to really make enough money off of it.

Unless new programs are written and old ones rewritten to take advantage of AMD's new micro arch, i think AMD is toast. They just dont have the market share to continue to fail like this. At least Nvidia is smart enough to delay till they have enough performance to be competitive, rather than send out slower crap than what the competition has. This is why VIA had to get out of the CPU market, and now it looks like AMD needs to be following suit if they cant cut the mustard. Intel cant hold back to much longer, they are already 2-3 years ahead of AMD and have Ivy Bridge ready that will simply crush AMD's whimpy thunder of their FX chips. I hate to say it, but i might just have to break down and actually buy Intel the next go around. Been using AMD since 1998...such a shame.

I don't know what to think really. Of course these will continue to develop and or be developed I am sure and therefore the capabilities will go up. I am disappointed with AMD though as long as they have been working on Bulldozer the performance should be better. I personally was an AMD die hard for many years. As far as it goes the system I am on now is an Intel system I won here and the last system I built uses a Phenom II 965 Black. However; I do not see much reason other than the enhanced memory and bandwidth capabilities, but that is also just as much the AM3+ chip set, as it is this CPU.

I apologize to anyone I offend by saying that I am disappointed, and it seems to be a decent unit especially regarding the price lines. I just think they should have had it more solid in the amount of time they have been working on it. The generals such as the build size (NM) and energy usage etc as well seems like a settlement rather than a drivenly developed device t me. I wanted more capabilities in many ways. I guess we will just have to see where it goes from here though as I said earlier.

The only thing is Draco AMD would most likely not exist any more if the did not have ATI and the profit they have gotten from the GPU's as AMD just had the first positive quarters for the last few quarters in many years. That was almost entirely due to there GPU's not there CPU's as they were just pulling even really financially.

Forget about Sandy Bridge Bulldozer is slower than Thuban clock for clock in the majority of applications both single and multi threaded and the power draw is totally inexcusable. What the hell is going on at AMD? They totally blew it with this sh.......

anyhow  welcome to HH AMD1 and seeing your 1st post  ...

sometimes we get a bit creative with some descriptions and have a bit more fun

Edit:: >>Thought to mention the above quoted post by AMD1 had been removed due to the profanity references.

That was Some Good Reading, thanks for the excellent, easy to read review Marco, as always... I had better expectations for the Amd Fx 8 core processor but it turns out to be a dud and did not fulfill as advertised. I have no reason to upgrade my x58 system with a 950@ 3.8 with a GTX 470. It's still going strong.....But still..the Amd Fx does a good job at the benchmarks that appeals to me like Video renders and multi-threaded applications., just no enough to win me over ...I did do as usual and compared reviews....I noticed something fishy going on several sites, I think they sold out to Amd for favorable reviews...glad I'm part of the most respected and reliable tech site around.... HotHardware.COM...thanks for the honest review, see ya guys around soon.

I think that AMD's bulldozer has finally ran out of diesel, like I predicted. It can't save itself no more, so amd will not have to go on filling it up with diesel. What they should of done was to try to out do the Ivy bridge chipset instead of the old LGA1366 pinset socket number chipset.

I'd have to agree. The bulldozer seems good compared to the old lga1366 socket number, but I wonder if they'll ever get out of this rut that they're in.

Everyone commenting needs to do a little more research. The way BD was tested (memory at 1600) cost it performance. Also the problems with GF cost it performance. There are some cache issues and branch perdiction issues.

1* Bulldozer needs its memory to be running at 1866. At that memory speed it is very competative with the 2600.

2* Windows 7 degrades its performance due to cache thrashing (Windows 8 beta gives +10% performance)

3* Running as a 4 core shows a very high gain in single thread performance in Windows 7

The next spin of the chip needs to fix the branch prediction issues, figure out what is wrong with the cache (most likely GF process issue) and fix it, and set BD to only use 1 thread per Compute Unit until you have 5 or more threads active. Microsoft is currently working to fix the issues with thread management, the virtualization companies are already releasing patches.

Bulldozers issues are mostly software and production process. The problems with the branch prediction could be anything, more test is 2CU/4C, 4CU/4C need to be done.

I understand what you are saying, but I wonder how many software vendors are going to put out patches?

I was really wanting Bulldozer to address the single/ lightly threaded issue that plagued Phenom.

No one disputes that AMD has been effective at multi-threaded/ multitasking situations, applications just don't make use of these capabilities often enough - even though quad core processors have been around for a long time now, long enough that there is no reason that any application should not be able to make use of all available resources.

Unfortunately, that is not the case. AMD needed to vastly improve IPC, and did not. I hope as this new design matures they can improve upon this area. I have always bought AMD, and will continue to do so, but as it stands I have to concede that Intel has the better chip - for now.

BTW I had an interesting thought, how does Bulldozer fair when there is a bunch of stuff running at the same time? Like on Grandma's PC that loads everything under the sun on start up? Might not Bulldozer show it's worth then?

That's the thing CDeeter, it does have a (slightly) higher IPC then the last generation when you run it 1 thread per CU.  The cache thrashing really hurts.

As for the patches, since it is an OS level update, expect it to happen to all the server based OSes fairly quicklly.

While multi threading is not super common yet. Its well on its way even though in first 3 or so years of 64 bit applications I saw 1 game come out with 64 bit programming available.

But I think the next release of operating systems along with gaming console will influence more devolopers to produce more 64 bit applications. Cause it will be flat out impossible to keep up graphically and speed wise with other companys.

As for performance keep in mind all mobos out were designed prior to the release of the cpu. With very little data on it I think after couple firmware updates. And new mobo designs we will see a good 10-20% performance gain. As applications become more and more friendly towards multi threaded computing I think you will see unparalled gains far greater than with other cpus currently on the market.

That being said AMDs biggest failure with this chip was focusing on a multi core processing power. Applications are still a 32 bit market there are 64 bit os and few other things but market is still pretty sparce. Right now buying phenom II 555 processor is still most bang for buck. Unlock into quad core overclock to 3.8/4.0 ghz and you got a processor that cost 75$ competing with 220-300$ processors. Give it a few years and when prices drop software changes and maybe the fx processor will become bang for buck winner. But not yet.

I'm sorry I'm just incredibly dissapointed with BD as an enthusiest and a shareholder.  My brother is a broker in NY for ML and he warned me not to buy AMD stock, but I didn't listen.  Then again he also told me Apple needed to keep hitting homeruns that was about two years ago.

I'm worried AMD made a mistake here. Future operating systems seem to be getting more simplified and not demanding on hardware (eg. win 8 specs are exactly the same as win 7, which was even lower than vista). In such a world single-threaded performance will be VERY important. AMD MUST improve single threaded performance in addition to adding more cores, or eventually they'll be further behind than they are now.

Oh well, seems like my Phenom II X61100T still has some life left in it.