AMD FX Series Processor

Code named as Zambezi which is the fourth longest river in Africa, AMD's FX series is going to compete directly with Intel's Core i series processor family based on Sandy Bridge micro architecture. Point to note here is that rather than imitating what Intel has done to increase number of cores per physical processor, AMD instead has made some innovative changes to its micro architecture.

Bulldozer micro architecture

At the heart of this micro architecture lies Bulldozer core also known as 'module'. Bulldozer's module with two cores, can be compared with a single Intel core with HyperThreading. The only difference between the two approaches is that Bulldozer provides dedicated schedulers and integer units for each thread, whereas in Intel's core, all threads must compete for available resources. So you can say that 'module' is something in between a true dual core (two physical cores) and a single core with simultaneous multithreading.

How it performed

We received AMD FX 8150 CPU for review. Being marketed as world's first native 8-core desktop processor and a Guinness world record holder for over clocking, expectations with this processor were quite high. To start with, you need a compatible motherboard with AM3+ processor socket. AM3+ is the modified AM3 socket with 942 pins.

But if you have AM3 socket motherboard, you can still use this processor once you have updated your BIOS to the latest version. FX 8150 comes with 8 native cores with 3.6 GHz of processor speed. Each processor has eight 48 KB of L1, 1024 KB L2, and 8192 KB of L3 Cache.

Setup

We used Gigabyte's 990FXA-UDD7 motherboard to test this processor. Though it is not having AM3+ processor we had to upgrade its BIOS to latest version. This could be tricky if you buy FX series processor and AM3 compatible motherboard which is not having latest BIOS. You won't be able to reach startup screen for BIOS upgrade unless you find earlier version of processor compatible with AM3 socket. To simplify BIOS update, Gigabyte has Q-Flash utility. You just need to press 'End' key from your keyboard while your machine is booting up to get into this utility. But before using this utility, download latest BIOS from Gigabyte website. Extract it in a pen drive and attach this pen drive to your machine. Now go to Q-Flash utility and update BIOS using attached pen drive. Once you have latest version of BIOS, you can attach FX series processor to your Gigabyte board and start using your latest processor.

In our test setup, we used 4 GB DDR3 RAM, 120 GB HDD with 7200 RPM, Radeon HD 6850 graphics card, and Windows 7 ultimate 32-bit operating system.

But before we talk about benchmarks that we used to test this processor it is necessary to point out a known issue. Due to new architecture, low performance in Bulldozer is often due to the way threads are scheduled by Windows 7 operating system.

To check the performance of this processor, we used three benchmarks: 3D Mark 06, PC Mark Vantage, and Cinebench release 11.5. Overall score of 16518 3DMarks is very high but this score also includes performance of attached graphics card. But even a CPU sub score of 5752 3D Marks is very high.

Moving from graphics capability to overall PC performance, PC Mark Vantage gave score of 6978 PC Marks which is again on higher side which means your office apps would run smoothly. Finally, when we checked performance of CPU with Cinebench, we got score of 5.73 points, more than Core i7 (4 core 8 thread) which scored 5.48. This makes it better than any other desktop processor.

Bottomline: It has heating issues but comes nicely packaged and so is easy to carry and connect.