Bulldozer (microarchitecture) - Processors - Performance On Windows

Performance On Windows

The first Bulldozer CPUs were met with a mixed response. It was discovered that the FX-8150 performed poorly in benchmarks that were not highly threaded, falling behind the second-generation Intel Core i* series processors and being matched or even outperformed by AMD's own Phenom II X6 at lower clock speeds. In highly threaded benchmarks, the FX-8150 performed on par with the Phenom II X6, and the Intel Core i7 2600K, depending on the benchmark. Given the overall more consistent performance of the Intel Core i5 2500K at a lower price, these results left many reviewers underwhelmed. The processor was found to be extremely power-hungry under load, especially when overclocked, compared to Intel's Sandy Bridge.

The Tom's Hardware website commented that the lower-than-expected performance in multi-threaded workloads may be because of the way Windows 7 currently schedules threads to the cores. They point out that "if Windows were able to utilize an FX-8150's four modules first, and then backfill each module's second core, it'd maximize performance with up to four threads running concurrently." This is similar to what happens on Intel CPUs with HyperThreading – Windows 7 "schedules to physical cores before utilizing logical (HyperThreaded) cores."

On 13 October, AMD stated on its blog that "there are some in our community who feel the product performance did not meet their expectations", but showed benchmarks on actual applications where it outperformed the Sandy Bridge i7 2600k and AMD X6 1100T.

On 6 March 2012, AMD posted a knowledge base article stating that there was a compatibility issue with FX processors, and certain games on the widely used digital game distribution platform, Steam. AMD stated that they had provided a BIOS update to several motherboard manufacturers (namely: Asus, Gigabyte Technology, MSI, and ASRock) that would fix the issue.