Windows 8: Does AMD's Bulldozer Architecture Benefit?

Features
By published

Shortly after AMD's Bulldozer architecture launched, AMD had us anticipating a couple of hotfixes that were supposed to improve FX-8150's performance. But Windows 8 was the ultimate goal. Now that the operating system is out, does it help FX-8150?

Benchmark Results: Audio And Video Encoding

Remember when we saw Acrobat X demonstrate the best performance under Windows 8 and the Bulldozer-optimized Windows 7 setup? Well, this time around, the single-threaded iTunes and Lame workloads favor Windows 8 exclusively. In searching for an explanation, one possibility springs to mind. Previous versions of Windows had a habit of bouncing threads from one core to another. If Windows 8 more effectively keeps threads on one core, alleviating the need to wake powered-down resources, perhaps it's able to affect single-threaded tasks more than we thought.

HandBrake and MainConcept fully-tax the FX-8150's four modules. So, we wouldn't expect either application to serve up a speed-up attributable to better scheduling.

Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom is a Senior Staff Editor at Tom's Hardware US. He tests and reviews cases, cooling, memory and motherboards.