Pricing Revealed for First AMD Bulldozer FX Chips
by Andrew Cunningham on September 12, 2011 2:00 PM ESTThough AMD began shipping Bulldozer-based sever CPUs last week, we're still waiting until Q4 for the new architecture to hit the desktop. In the meantime, however, pre-order pricing for the high-end FX-series CPUs (codenamed Zambezi) has been leaked, giving the AMD faithful an idea of how much the new processors will set them back.
| AMD Bulldozer FX-series Processors | |||||||
| Name | Cores | CPU Clock | L2 Cache | L3 Cache | TDP | Price | |
| FX-8150 | 8 | 3.6GHz (4.2GHz Turbo) | 8MB | 8MB | 125W | $266.28 | |
| FX-8120 | 8 | 3.1GHz (4GHz Turbo) | 8MB | 8MB | 125W | $221.73 | |
| FX-6100 | 6 | 3.3GHz (3.9GHz Turbo) | 6MB | 8MB | 95W | $188.32 | |
If you think that these prices seem too low for eight and six-core chips, remember that Bulldozer's architecture is such that a "dual-core" CPU is actually one core with two copies of several hardware features - the CPU is visible to the OS as two cores, but physically each of AMD's cores is somewhere in between Intel's HyperThreading implementation and a "true" dual-core design - you can read Anand's original Bulldozer post for more information on this.
The Bulldozer-based FX-series processors are targeted at the high-end of the market, and therefore do not include an on-board GPU. The 32nm processors will be available in Q4 of this year for socket AM3+ motherboards (and some socket AM3 motherboards with an updated BIOS, though these motherboards may not be able to take advantage of all of Bulldozer's new features).
Source: CPU World
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DanNeely - Monday, September 12, 2011 - link
The FPU in previous AMD units was only 128bits wide; so each bulldozer unit has (before architectural improvements) roughly the same FPU performance as two previous generation cores except that when only one core is doing floating point math it can use all of it.red_dog007 - Monday, September 12, 2011 - link
Plus long term, AMD is banking on the idea that more and more work will be offloaded onto the GPU. Thus the move to APUs and trashing their VLIW architecture in favor of a GPGPU design.stunnery - Monday, September 12, 2011 - link
Bulldozer is a lot more cheaper compared to Intel's i7 2600K (~$330).I have a feeling that it is not going to beat the Sandy Bridge CPUs in terms of performance.
** Disclaimer
I am not a fanboy of Intel or AMD.
I am just merely speculating based on the listing price.
Skott - Monday, September 12, 2011 - link
I would love it if BD could take the performance crown too but I seriously doubt it can even match SB. If it did AMD wouldn't keep pushing things back and keeping it all hush hush I'm thinking. AMD will continue with a cheaper product that can do the job somewhat good enough.danjw - Monday, September 12, 2011 - link
Maybe not. You need to remember that AMD has been behind Intel for a long time on performance. They need to dig themselves out of a perception hole. I would really like to see AMD show some real competition to Intel. We will have to wait and see what the performance numbers look like, before we assume anything. I do have to admit that since they aren't already bragging, that is does look a bit unlikely.XZerg - Monday, September 12, 2011 - link
If so then AMD is launching another dud compared to SNB and Ivy and it is in serious trouble going forward. And so will the end users who were hoping on some competition.JarredWalton - Monday, September 12, 2011 - link
Unfortunately, all signs point to Zambezi being less than stellar; I suspect that clock for clock, a single BD core will be slower than current K10.5 stuff, but you'll get more cores. It will also be interesting to see how Turbo Core plays out; if it's as cautious as some of the other chips, the eight core chips will only run at the base (or base + 1) frequency for anything more than dual-core workloads.Z Throckmorton - Monday, September 12, 2011 - link
"Less than stellar" still leaves a lot of room for success. Outside of a few niche tasks/use scenarios, AMD has nothing that can compete with the i5-2500K, and has nothing at all that can compete with the i7-2600K. Unless AMD mindlessly priced these chips, they now have the FX-8120 aimed right at the i5-2500K and the FX-8150 aimed a bit below the i7-2600K.I don't really care how many cores it takes for AMD to rival Intel. I care about performance, price, and power usage - period. All signs point to Bulldozer being competitive with Sandy Bridge and failing only to exceed the current top-end SB SKU. I do fear that BD will be far less power efficient than SB, though this is not always much of a concern at the high-end.
Again, *IF* performance matches these prices, AMD has regained competitiveness at the mid-high and (arguably) high-end consumer segments. This is great news for all enthusiasts.
silverblue - Monday, September 12, 2011 - link
We still have to play the waiting game. Not sure about the power efficiency argument, but the A8 isn't a bad example of AMD finally closing the gap somewhat in this area.Those prices will only truly be put into perspective once there's benchmarks out, rather than comparing them to the price of a 2600K. I'd love to believe AMD were taking their time to build up a huge stockpile but with the rumours about new client steppings, I'm less inclined to think that.
silverblue - Monday, September 12, 2011 - link
John Freuhe has a remark about that in the comments here...http://blogs.amd.com/work/2011/05/16/stop-the-cloc...