Test Systems

As many of you know, AMD claimed the Windows 7 thread scheduler was not optimized for Bulldozer architecture, and its wrong core workload allocation could hinder performance. Windows 8 by their claims, in certain situations will bring up to 10% more performance compared to Windows 7, and in the meantime Microsoft published two hotfixes for Windows 7 correcting this problem.

The problem with Windows 7 was that it could not distinguish modules from cores, and since in Bulldozer each module has two cores with shared resources it is more performance effective to assign threads first per module, then per core if modules are populated. If module one has Cores 0 and 1, module two Cores 2 and 3, with this hotfix Windows 7 will assign first thread to Core 0 in first module and second thread to Core 2 in second module, so both CORES in separate modules will have full control of module resources not having to share them with the other core idling, or in CC6 state. Only after all first cores in every module are busy working, Windows 7 will assign the next thread to the second core in a module and thus making cores in that module share resources.

This patch is highly recommended for all FX processor owners, although you should not expect more than marginal improvements. The update will be most beneficial with lightly threaded workloads, where 2-4 cores are active. In the following graphs, results with and without the two hotfixes applied are shown.

Below you can see the entire list of programs used to test our processors. Most of the tests make good use of multithreading, but just like real-life situations, there are some tests that prefer higher clock frequencies over number of cores or size of L2/L3 cache buffer. Since Windows 7 64-bit is used from now on as base for processor benchmarks, some of benchmarks are used in 64-bit versions as well.

Benchmark Suite

• Aida64 Extreme - Read/Write/Copy/Latency
• PC Mark Vantage 64-bit
• 3D Mark 11 Performance preset (Physics and Combined score)
• wPrime v2.04 1024M
• SuperPI 1M

• I'm Too Audio Encoder v6.1.2 - FLAC to LAME MP3 320kbs
• dBpoweramp R14 - FLAC to LAME MP3 320kbs
• Windows Media Player 12 -Audio CD to MP3 320kbs

• x264 benchmark HD V3.0
• Im Too HD Video Converter 6 - 1080p trailer encode via Matroska profi
• AVS Video Converter 7.1 - 1080p trailer encode via Video for Facebook profile

• Photoshop CS5 64bit Retouch Artists Speed Test
• Cinebench R11 64-bit
• POV Ray 3.7b 64-bit

• 7zip v9.20 64-bit - 32 MB mutithreading
• WinRAR Benchmark v4.0 64-bit
• Real life compression ~ 1 GB folder (139 files)
• TrueCrypt - 100 MB encryption/decryption benchmark

• Batman Arkham Asylum
• Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War II Chaos Rising
• Formula 1 2010
• Mafia II
• Metro 2033

• Prime95 (Small FTT-s) for maximum heat and power consumption

Specifications

In the table below you can review detailed specifications of FX-8150 and other models that will show up later in the performance graphs.