AMD will launch the Bulldozer microarchitecture in Q2 2011. With up to 8 processor cores Bulldozer will take aim for the performance market and for consumers the Scorpius platform is the most interesting. With some help from AMD’s own product slides we can see how the octo-core Zambezi processors are expected to perform.
AMD’s top model of the Zambezi family will get 8 processor cores and it has been rumored that these processors will launch under the glorious FX brand. Even if AMD doesn’t mention any frequencies or product names in the slides that has leaked the CPU it discusses will launch as Vision Black FX and will be the new flagship product for Socket AM3+.
As an early performance indication dated December 2010 we shouldn’t draw too many conclusions from these numbers. We can’t be entirely certain the numbers comes from AMD, but the slides look authentic. We do have some questions though, like how it presents Intel’s CPU with Sockel 1156 and then talk about a Socket 1366 CPU in the form of Core i7 950 in the diagrams.
AMD claims that an octo-core Bulldozer CPU will offer 50% better performance than both Intel’s quad-core Core i7 processors and AMD’s current hexa-core Phenom II X6 1100T CPU. The benchmarks are divided into media (PCMark Vantage: TV and Movies test), rendering (Cinebench 11.5) and games (3Dmark 06: CPU test).
Judging from the diagrams it’s clear that Bulldozer performs well in the rendering test, where the 8 cores really get to sweat. The media test is a lot more even when comparing to last generation processor architectures and then back to a significant lead in the 3DMark06 CPU test. This is a pretty interesting test though since it is a well known fact that 3DMark06 CPU test doesn’t scale well over 4 cores, which should mean that Bulldozer has made progress in game performance.
The presentation published by Donanimhaber is the base of the performance indications that we wrote about last wee, but we should still consider all of this with a pinch of salt since it is still a couple of months to go before AMD will really launch the Scorpius platform, while you can also never be entirely certain about unconfirmed sources.
Sources: Donanimhaber
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