The Wait is Over: AMD Launches its First ‘FX’ Bulldozer Processors

After what has felt like an eternal wait, AMD has finally launched its first Bulldozer desktop processors. This launch marks the first time since the original K7 that AMD has about started from scratch, designing a CPU with a fresh mindset and with the ultimate goal of catching up to its biggest competitor. Has it happened? That depends on your perspective.

Performance-wise, it’s been rumored for a while that Bulldozer wasn’t about to reach Sandy Bridge heights, and now that the CPUs have launched, it’s been confirmed. There’s a reason that AMD’s flagship FX-8150 eight-core retails for just under $250, after all. Instead, AMD’s current goal is to deliver the best bang for the buck, giving its users eight cores rather than four.

That means little in the grand scheme, however, as the FX-8150 doesn’t always manage to surpass Intel’s Core i7-2500K, and costs a bit more. As this is an AMD 8 core vs. Intel 4 core / 8 thread match-up, AMD should have the upper-hand here – but it doesn’t. Power consumption has always been a problem with AMD, and the FX-8150’s 125W vs. Core i7-2500K’s 95W is another fact that’s hard to ignore.

Given all this, it seems likely that AMD will drop the prices of its launch Bulldozer parts in due time, while at the same time performing its usual clock-bumps to get even faster products on the market. A major feature of Bulldozer that AMD touts is that it operates well at higher frequencies, and though I haven’t performed overclocking up to this point, it wouldn’t surprise me if we saw a 3.8GHz or higher option in time (who thought we’d see that again?).

There are a couple of things that work to AMD’s favor, however. Bulldozer is designed as a future-looking chip and offers instruction sets like XOP and FMA4, which could drastically improve media decoding/encoding performance should developers take full advantage of it.

Below is the list of Bulldozer desktop processors that are launching today or will be launching soon:

The flagship FX-8150 falls in at $245 while a 500MHz drop will net you the FX-8120 for $205. Giving people a middle-ground, the six-core FX-6100 can be had for $165, while those looking to build a Bulldozer rig on the absolute cheap will be able to get an FX-4100 quad-core for about $115. At the current time, Newegg is selling all of these chips with a slight premium, so for those looking to make the most of their purchase, I’d recommend holding off for a week or so to see where prices go from here.

Unlike most major CPU launches, where we receive the final product weeks in advance to allow in-depth testing, AMD for this launch gave us (and most others) just a single week to pound things out. Making a tight situation even tighter, I had to go out of town for four days and also have been battling sickness. As if more needed to be piled on, this launch came while we were neck-deep in revising our CPU testing suite.

This all said, I’m aiming to deliver our look in a couple of weeks, to allow us to get our suite finished, be able to rebenchmark some CPUs and also test Bulldozer as well as it can be tested in such a small amount of time. In the meantime, I recommend checking out the respective reviews from a couple of our friends: The Tech Report and Legit Reviews.