Windows 8: Does AMD's Bulldozer Architecture Benefit?

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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.

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.