Bulldozer Arrives Amd Fx 8150 Review How We Tested Bandwidth

AMD AM3+ Test System Specs - AMD Phenom II X6 1100T (3.30GHz) - AMD Phenom II X4 980 (3.70GHz) - AMD FX-8150 (3.60GHz) - AMD FX-8120 (3.10GHz) - AMD FX-6100 (3.30GHz) - AMD FX-4170 (4.20GHz) - x2 4GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-14900 (CAS 8-9-8-24) - Asrock Fatal1ty 990FX Professional (AMD 990FX) - OCZ ZX Series 1250w - Crucial m4 256GB (SATA 6Gb/s) - Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 SOC (1536MB) Software - Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit - Nvidia Forceware 285.38 Intel LGA1155 Test System Specs - Intel Core i7-2600K - Intel Core i5-2500K - x2 4GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-14900 (CAS 8-9-8-24) - Gigabyte G1.Sniper2 (Intel Z68) - OCZ ZX Series 1250w - Crucial m4 256GB (SATA 6Gb/s) - Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 SOC (1536MB) - Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit - Nvidia Forceware 285.38 Intel LGA1366 Test System Specs - Intel Core i7-975 Extreme Edition (3.33GHz) - Intel Core i7-920 (2.66GHz) - x3 2GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-12800 (CAS 8-8-8-20) - Gigabyte G1.Sniper (Intel X58) - OCZ ZX Series 1250w - Crucial m4 256GB (SATA 6Gb/s) - Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 SOC (1536MB) Software - Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit - Nvidia Forceware 285.38 Intel LGA1156 Test System Specs - Intel Core i5-750 - x2 4GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-12800 (CAS 8-8-8-20) - Gigabyte P55A-UD7 (Intel P55) - OCZ ZX Series 1250w - Crucial m4 256GB (SATA 6Gb/s) - Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 SOC (1536MB) - Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit - Nvidia Forceware 285.38 Compared to the Phenom II, AMD’s FX processors provide significantly more memory bandwidth. Read throughput has been increased by roughly 60%, while write performance is almost 40% better. Although the bandwidth performance has been improved greatly, it’s still considerably slower than Intel’s Sandy Bridge processors. The L2 cache performance has also been improved – at least when looking at the Phenom II range. The FX-8150 delivered 30% more read throughput than the Phenom II X6 1100T, though the write performance was slightly slower. As with the previous chart, Bulldozer just can’t match Sandy Bridge’s L2 cache performance.