If for no reason other than interest in reinvigorating competition in the CPU market, we wanted AMD to have a hit with its new Bulldozer CPU architecture. Sadly, reviews from around the Web indicate that AMD's new Bulldozer-driven FX-8150 CPU won't challenge Intel's leadership in performance and value.
On shelves, you'll find three different series in AMD's new FX line. Note, too, that FX is now a standalone product line, as opposed to AMD's older, "FX"-designated Athlon and Phenom performance chips. And similar to the K variants of Intel's Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs, all of the FX chips ship with the CPU multiplier unlocked, making them ripe for overclocking.
Broken down into four-, six-, and eight-core series, at least the FX's number-based naming conventions make sense. AMD has also priced these chips aggressively. The $245 FX-8150 falls in between Intel's $315 Core i7 2600K and its $220 Core i5 2500K chips. If it competed well, it would be a steal.
Out of frequency
With those high core clock speeds, you might think the FX chips would give Intel robust competition. At its slowest, the FX-8150 operates at 3.6GHz per core, with the ability to ramp at least one core up to 4.2GHz when AMD's Turbo Core technology kicks in. Intel's Core i7 2600K operates from 3.4GHz to 3.8GHz.
That automatic speed scaling, by the way, is a now-common characteristic of modern CPUs. AMD's Turbo Core is different than Intel's Turbo Boost, but they offer the same capability, wherein the chips adjust the clock speed across the processing cores (and processing threads, in Intel's case) based on the thermal constraints of the chip and the demands of the current processing task.
Despite its higher clock speed range, across the various enthusiasts sites that tested the FX-8150, AMD's new chip fell flat compared with both the Core i7 2600K and the more affordable Core i5 2500K.
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