I said from the beginning that Bulldozer architecture is a turning point for AMD, defining what will happen to the company's products in the coming years also, knowing the philosophy behind this new architecture, and most fans both new company or simply technology enthusiasts have built many expectations about the Bulldozer. 8 cores combined in an effective, attention by mainstream market AMD FX brand and achieve a return of 8.43 GHz frequency before launch, all fit this product seems to be very competitive.
But with our short passing test suite, we had the most brutal awakening since test components and write reviews, pure and simple, it is difficult to find a scenario where the bulldozer is a competitive solution. Handbrake only approach the performance of i7 2600K and with lower price may be considered a smart choice, assuming you only x264 encoding, but what about heat dissipation and energy consumption, of the approximately 250 RON save will have to buy a cooler better and we will remain current for many bills. Or what of the lack of vigor in multithreaded applications less, or downright tragic performance in floating point calculations? How justified that in some benchmarks is considerably slower than its predecessor, the Phenom II? How explain that encourages overclocking AMD producer, but Bulldozer double their energy consumption and so much just by raising the frequency and voltage in modest limits?
And we can not even enjoy the fact that AMD motherboards are usually cheaper because Bulldozer requires a motherboard with a power floor very, very strong to cope with current consumed by the processor, so therefore quite expensive talking about models that bring the cost to a platform similar to the Intel platform.
Unfortunately for us Bulldozer was not what we expected, and the disappointment is even greater as this architecture marks five years since AMD has lost market leadership processors, and 5 years from the last iteration of the FX brand . As a user of the Athlon 64, I remember the aura of exclusivity now that benefited expensive FX series processors, which fully deserves its price but because they were able performance. 5 years later, we are dealing with the hurting memory of his ancestors FX, a significantly lower performance than the competition and significantly higher consumption. And, in this case the price really does not matter. We want to see $ 1,000 AMD processors able to fight alongside solutions from Intel, not cheap products that do not justify their price anyway.
We can only hope that AMD will somehow fix the problem even in short-term energy consumption by a new revision, otherwise quite dark days loom for this area, as lack of real competition at this level does not bring anything good for the consumer final.
