Windows 8: Does AMD's Bulldozer Architecture Benefit?
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: Productivity
Most of the tests in our benchmark suite are well-threaded, so there's very little to report from 3ds Max, FineReader, Blender, or Visual Studio 2010.
With OpenCL enabled in WinZip 16.5, the Windows 8-based configuration enjoys a nice performance improvement. WinRAR goes the other direction, and the setup with Microsoft's FX-optimized hotfixes does worse than the Windows 7 install current as of August 2012. The 7-Zip benchmark scores don't change much at all.
Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Current page: Benchmark Results: Productivity
Prev Page Benchmark Results: Audio And Video Encoding Next Page Does Windows 8 Help Improve Bulldozer's Performance?-
agnickolov Of particular interest to me is that compilation with Visual Studio does slow down a bit on Windows 8. Not what the story was about, but still a valuable tidbit...Reply -
Crashman boogien8LOL awesome! the last line of this review is epic!That last line is the result of AMD creating unrealistic expectations for Windows 8. Things have gotten somewhat better for AMD since Piledriver launched, it's too bad that this article was written before that launch :)Reply -
silverblue I wouldn't mind seeing if, with Windows 8 and the 8350, hardware can take full advantage of the software instead of the other way around. I was a little dubious about blaming Microsoft in the first place - this isn't quite the Vista scheduler and Phenom all over again.Reply
Good article. :) It does seem that the patches create more problems than they solve, so I'd be inclined to ignore them if I had an FX on Windows 7. -
esrever Nice to see this finally tested, looks like the performance boost isn't significant enough to matter but at least there is a 1% increase. AMD can use all the minor performance boost they can get at this point.Reply -
belardo Throw in the Intel i5-3550 and 3570K CPUs with Win7 and Win8 and see what the numbers say... wouldn't that be fair to see the difference as well?Reply
DjEaZy... gonna get me a FX 8350 anyway... it's cheep as dirt and i have the platform... Yeah, if you already have the board and memory, its mostly logical. But for someone going for a rebuild... it is not, especially if you live near a Microcenter.
I paid $190 for my i5-3570K CPU, $90 for my Z77 gigabyte motherboard which out-does AMD 900 Series boards. Z77 have native USB 3.0, SATA 3.0, PCIe 3.0... AMD doesn't have PCIe 3.0 until 2014. And unless you get an A-Series CPU, you don't have native USB 3.0 either.
This, an AMD boards are a bit more costly and more complicated.
The OTHER AMD problem is that they are packaging clean CPU coolers with their CPUs... they are loud!! So add $25 for a good replacement. The extra costs for electricity doesn't help.
-
The Emperor's New Clothes9538570 said:Nice to see this finally tested, looks like the performance boost isn't significant enough to matter but at least there is a 1% increase. AMD can use all the minor performance boost they can get at this point.