AMD FX-8150 Processor Review – Bulldozer Arrives

SiSoftware Sandra 2011 SP5

The Sisoft Sandra 2011 SP5 benchmark utility just came out a few weeks
ago and we have started to include it in our benchmarking. Sandra 2011 comes with
support for Virtualisation (Virtual PC/Server, Hyper-V, VMware) and
GPGPU (OpenCL, DirectX 11 DirectCompute), but today we will be using the
program to look at memory and CPU performance!

Results: All of test systems used the identical Corsair Vegenance Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) memory kit that ran at 1866MHz with 9-10-9-28 1T timings with the exception of the AMD Phenom II systems that were run at 1600MHz with CL9 timings. As you can see the Intel processors rule the roost here, but the FX-8150 does show more memory bandwidth than the A8-3850 Llano APU and both are running in dual-channel memory mode at 1866MHz.

The Sandra Processor Multi-Media benchmark has been a long time
favorite of ours to look at floating point performance on processors.

Results:
The AMD FX-8150 processors loves the Int x16 iSSE4.1 test and fairly respectable floating point performance.

Cryptography has become an important part of our digital life: it
allows us to conduct safe transactions online, certify programs and
services, keep our data secure and much more. Sandra 2010c has a
dedicated benchmark built-in that measures cryptographic performance,
which is important on the new Intel 32nm processors like the Core i7
980X. It includes features like AES-NI!
Intel AES-NI is a new set of Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD)
instructions that are going to be introduced in the next generation of
Intel processors, as of 2009. These instructions enable fast and secure
data encryption and decryption, using the Advanced Encryption Standard
(AES), defined by FIPS Publication number 197. The architecture
introduces six instructions that offer full hardware support for AES.
Four of them support high performance data encryption and decryption,
and the other two instructions support the AES key expansion procedure.
Let’s take a look at how this feature impacts Cryptography performance.

Results: The processors with the AES-NI instruction set are very evident in this benchmark. The AMD FX-8150 now includes AES-NI instructions and the performance is now much closer to what Intel is offering with the Core i7-2600K.