We've already seen AMD's Bulldozer architecture come up short in the performance benchmarks. However, the company also claims it made important improvements to power consumption. Can FX-8150 at least score some points in the energy efficiency department?
Utilizing power efficiently isn't just a fringe message from environmentalists any more; it's a more mainstream concern, even from enthusiasts who are tired of pushing tons of air through their systems just to keep 300 W graphics cards stable. Processor vendors are on-board, too. AMD and Intel both preach the message of doing more with less power (generally whenever it's most convenient).
The message is a good one, though. Multiply out millions of platforms around the world and a few watts shaved off of each has a significant impact on the global energy demand. It's a matter of common sense: draw as much power required for the task at hand, but as little as possible when the performance (or energy use) isn't necessary.
In that regard, how do AMD's latest FX processors fare in the energy efficiency department?
Before it was FX, AMD's top-end desktop family was referred to as its code-name, Zambezi. What we discovered in AMD Bulldozer Review: FX-8150 Gets Tested was that AMD was not able to close the gap between its own best effort and Intel's almost year-old Sandy Bridge architecture.
It didn't help that launch pricing on the new FX chips made them more expensive than competing Intel-based products that are generally faster. Worse still, what can only be interpreted as very limited supply is currently inflating the cost of AMD's existing line-up. Now, we're seeing FX-8150s selling for $280 at the top-end and -4100s going for $130 at the bottom.
What Does Efficiency Mean, Anyway?
AMD isn't hopeless in its first generation of the Bulldozer architecture, though. The company's architects continually talk about maximizing what their hardware can do per watt of power consumption. Much effort was put into shutting down logic when it's not in use, and optimizing for efficiency. If the FX processors can achieve what its designers say (and what benchmarks have a difficult time showing when you look at performance on its own), then it's just a matter of finding the right price point for these CPUs.
To use an old car analogy, we're looking to measure the MPG rating of this processor at a given speed.
Low energy consumption on its own doesn't directly translate to high efficiency. Especially in today's world of single- and multi-threaded applications, it's important to take different workloads into account. We'd argue that no desktop machine runs at full throttle 24x7, making idle behavior incredibly important, too. We'd also go so far to say that big power consumption at full load is acceptable if a platform can get its task completed faster and drop back to idle (with its corresponding lower power use) yet again.
Benchmarks: Intel Sandy Bridge
Intel earned some well-deserved praise over the past few years for the efficiency of its Core processors and, even more so, the Sandy Bridge architecture (second-gen Core i3/i5/i7). In other words, systems based on those CPUs consume very little power at idle, and are also relatively energy-efficient under load.
We've already seen the performance numbers and know how that story ends. The question now is: how well does AMD handle efficiency with its new desktop flagship? Did the company's efforts to share certain on-die resources pay off with better over utilization of a nearly 2 billion-transistor design? Today we're comparing Zambezi to AMD's own Phenom II X4 and X6 products, along with comparable CPUs from Intel. How does AMD's top-end 125 W FX-8150 size up to its most potent competition, Intel's 95 W Core i5-2500K, in the efficiency department?
- Testing The Efficiency Of AMD's Bulldozer
- AMD CPUs: Phenom II X4 980 BE And X6 1100T
- Intel CPUs: Core i5-750 And Core i5-2500K
- Intel CPUs: Core i7-870, Core i7-975 Extreme, Core i7-980X Extreme, And Core i7-2600K
- AMD’s Challenger: FX-8150
- Test Setup And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: Audio/Video
- Benchmark Results: Office And Data Archiving
- Benchmark Results: Professional Applications
- Benchmark Results: Matlab
- Power Consumption: Idle/Load
- Single-Threaded Efficiency
- Multi-Threaded Efficiency
- Efficiency Round-Up
- Bulldozer: Improvements Are Urgently Needed

the benchmarks with real world softwares(and not some specialized highly threaded synthetic benchmark that gives biased results) are the ones that matter to me. i use some of the softwares occassionally (blender), some more frequently (winrar, 7zip, lame encoder) and this article helped me a lot when i choose my next pc.
did you guys see the ridiculous tdp number on cpu-z screenshot of fx8150? 223 w what the !@#$. i wonder which one got it wrong, amd or cpu-z.
amd-fans-in-denial can argue as much as they want, but the reality didn't change. the efficiency numbers pretty much mirrored the bd review - bd isnt power efficient. even the ph ii 980 - the most power hungry of phenoms is more power efficient than fx 8150. and people who don't care about power consumption should care about the cooling and maintenance bd would need along with a power hungry high performance gfx card. imagine running an air-cooled fx 8150 @ 4.7 ghz with nvidia gtx 580 or radeon hd 6990.
i can use any kind of acronyms like 'lol' or 'lmao' on bd's laughable power efficiency(even lynnfield beat it!) and performance but i am really sad and disappointed.
if amd can't compete with intel, intel will keep selling their cpu at a high(and higher) price - avg users like me will be the loser.
Ya, the MSRP is $332, but the price on newegg is $370. Even for a brand new processor that's a huge premium over MSRP. It'll stabilize to the $330 price range eventually, but this initial price hike is no doubt related to the Bulldozer launch.
Not really, for the most time everyone was aware that BD was not going to be a SB killer, AMD themselves had hinted at it, then their PR department (propaganda office I would say) started pumping up the hype.
2700K is BS... 100MHz extra is definitely not worth it. 2600K and 2500K remain best bang for buck right now.
But that's what Llano actually is - four Husky cores and a 6xxx GPU. I'm not sure what you're getting at.
And you don't know if AMD purposefully binned better quality chips for the server market. I admit, it's an assumption, but a reasonable one, wouldn't you say? Let's wait for the reviews and see.
I'm liking the article, but considering all the comments about the ASUS board being power hungry, plus the touted motherboard round up, I'm finding it strange that you'd use the CVF again. Still, good article, thanks very much.
Interesting article I'll stick with my I7-950 for a while. Was on a P4 and skipped over 3-4 proc generations before needed to upgrade. Hoping to get the same longevity from my 950 as well.
As far as the average user goes, yes. This is correct. I run BOINC so my desktop is always at 100% CPU load 24/7 365; 4 cores/8 threads always maxed.
And you don't know if AMD purposefully binned better quality chips for the server market. I admit, it's an assumption, but a reasonable one, wouldn't you say? Let's wait for the reviews and see.
I'm liking the article, but considering all the comments about the ASUS board being power hungry, plus the touted motherboard round up, I'm finding it strange that you'd use the CVF again. Still, good article, thanks very much.
you're right. i mixed up amd's naming schemes and thought llano was made of athlon class 'stars' cores with radeon 'sumo' 6xxx igp. i missed that the whole thing was called a husky core.
kitguru did a power consumption comparison with a gigabyte 990fx board. they also compared how much power fx 8150 and others use at the same oc speed. the results are not different, it was the fx 8150 that was power hungry.
I would have to agree on that basis; 68 more watts for the 8150 under full load as compared to the 2600K at default clocks. I was hoping for a bit of good news on that front, but sadly it's not to be. I'd like to see more as regards disabling every even numbered core (and what it does to power), however buying an octo-core to use it as a quad-core is somewhat, well, counter-productive.
On another topic, I find it amusing that AMD went from an anaemic 2MB L3 cache in Phenom to 6MB with Phenom II, yet with no L3 cache, Llano is noticeably faster than Phenom - is it memory related? Just ignore SYSMark 2007 (hell, if you compare the 8150 with the Core2 Extreme QX9770, the latter wins...).
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/403?vs=21
Ummm.... wtf do you mean "AMD purposefully binned better quality chips for the server market"? So you mean, the Bulldozers that will make it to the servers will SUDDENLY have much lower power draw? Yeah, right.
There's a separate Bulldozer server line which came before FX series. FX series was NOT meant to be a server chip. It was made for gaming and failed in that area. The only area where it might be useful is the workstation. BD scores top benchmarks in Photoshop - it will be great for a light Photoshop user (a heavy user who earns money with Photoshop will just get a Xeon). It also falls in between 2500/K and 2600/K in some other multimedia creation software, both price- and performance-wise. That's where these chips must logically end up.
Well, at least good to see that the fanboys have settled down with their "patches" and "fixes" that are allegedly supposed to set BD's performance straight...
It would be like this:
- Fx-8150 uses about 40% more power, measured in watt-hours than 1st core gen.
- FX-8150 uses about 164% more power, measured in watt-hours than 2nd core gen.
- FX-8150 uses about 11% more power, measured in watt-hours than AMD last generation.