Bulldozer + Linux = Bliss

[deadrats]

phoronix put up a comprehensive review of the FX 8150 and in many tests bulldozer absolutely smoked sandy bridge, almsot matching the mighty i7 990x 6 core 12 thread monster:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_fx8150_bulldozer&num=1

anyone that has ever run a distro with a custom compiled kernel on an AMD processor will attest to the fact that linux seems to love amd processors; i used to run a dual boot with win 2k (later xp) and redhat (later fedora) with a custom compiled kernel and it used to fly on the athlon xp i had, same thing when i later switched to an athlon 64.

[poisondeathray]

Good news

Apparently there is something with windows thread scheduler that negatively impacts bulldozer performance. It's supposed to be improved in windows 8. I can't remember the website, but they posted it a couple of days ago

EDIT: I think it was this one
http://techreport.com/articles.x/21865

[johns0]

From what i saw it wasn't a smoke show in the tests,seems the 2500k beat it in most cases and lost by around 20% in a few tests.

[poisondeathray]

Maybe he was referring to the relevant video related ones, like ffmpeg and x264
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_fx8150_bulldozer&num=10

It's a total reversal of results on the dozens of review sites (but they almost all did their benchmarks on windows)

[deadrats]

@poisondeathray:

that's exactly what i was referring to but overall it's almost the exact opposite of what the windows results are; it seems if you're a linux user your choice is bulldozer all the way.

[poisondeathray]

I'm hoping it's reflective of architecture performance, and that it's only OS issues that is the cause for the lower performance numbers we've been seeing. Hopefull it can be improved in Win8

So at least it's not *all* bad in the AMD camp. Bulldozer still guzzles power, but maybe a few respins can slightly improve that

We badly need some competition for intel

[jagabo]

phoronix put up a comprehensive review of the FX 8150 and in many tests bulldozer absolutely smoked sandy bridge, almsot matching the mighty i7 990x 6 core 12 thread monster

They didn't compare to any Sandy Bridge i7, only the older Gulftown i7 CPUs. In many tests the 8150 was beaten soundly, or nearly matched, a quad core Sandy Bridge i5 2500K. Zzz...

[dragonkeeper]

They didn't compare to any Sandy Bridge i7, only the older Gulftown i7 CPUs. In many tests the 8150 was beaten soundly, or nearly matched, a quad core Sandy Bridge i5 2500K. Zzz...

I just skimmed through some of the results, many of the test have the 8150 compared to a i7 920 as well. it actaully seems to perform very well on Linux. And there is mention of kernel optimizations in the pipe for Linux. Which makes the 8150 a fav with Linux users.

[jagabo]

I just skimmed through some of the results, many of the test have the 8150 compared to a i7 920 as well.

An even older (3 years) generation i7 clocked at a mere 2.66 GHz. A Core i7 2600K would have won every benchmark except maybe the ffmpeg encoding where it may have lost by a fair bit, and x264 encoding where it would have lost by a small margin. This is the same thing all the other tech sites where showing.