AMD’s processor architecture Bulldozer has been a long rollercoaster with delays and silence from AMD. AMD has not offered anything by silence, but in talks with an AMD employee it has been confirmed that has started mass production of the FX series and that the launch is not far off.
AMD was supposed to launch the FX series back in Q2, but had to postpone. Instead it promised a launch in the coming 60-90 days after June 1st, thus sometime in August, which we all know didn’t happen. The next rumor was September, but also this will not happen.
NordicHardware has acquired more concrete information on Bulldozer from an AMD employee. We asked what has been goingon with the FX series and why AMD has been nothing but quiet. The answer was disturbing, AMD has not been sure when it would be able to launch the FX series, which has forced them to put the lid on.
The situation is still uncertain at AMD and it is not certain when the launch will be, but mass production of AMD “Bulldozer” FX series has started. As it stands today AMD hopes to launch in 4-5 weeks. The latest rumors have been that AMD aims for October 13th and this may very well be correct.
The test system with FX-8150 AMD presented
We also get the chance to to sit with a system equipped with the octo-core processor FX-8150 clocked at 3.6 GHz with a Turbo mode at 4.2 GHz. Due to the limited time we had we only had time to runt the aged SuperPi 1.5 and wPrime 2.05. Unfortunately the results are far from representative for the final products, so these numbers are to be taken with a pinch of salt.
In the agedSuperPi it took 20.992 second to calculate 1 million decimals. Considering Bulldozer is a whole new architecture it is possible that AMD has chosen to do no real optimization of x87 code. We should not forget that SuperPi is in no way reliable for comparing performance, and even worse when it comes to AMD processors.
In the newer and more interesting wPrime 2.05 the processor gets a final score of 15.815 seconds. We have reason to believe this is not correct, since Bulldozer would perform on the level of AMD A6-3650 in that case. The odd, or to say really bad, benchmarks couild be because of several thing, but most likely the processor has an older stepping, or the BIOS did not have the latest AGESA code from AMD.
Even if the benchmarks are not reliable we can confirm one thing: if everything is going as planned at AMD the launch of the new FX series in 4-5 weeks. We should also get clear signs if the new flagship from AMD is worth the wait. AMD still says that it expects the FX series to become the fastest retail processor.
