14 DAY TRIAL // In what may or may not be a surprising turn of events, an engineering sample of an AMD FX CPU (central processing unit) has made its way into the hands of those likely to benchmark it, and this is exactly what reports say happened.
AMD's Fusion technology definitely has gained a significant following, a process that started back in January (with the appearance of the C and E-series of APUs) and continued with the A-Series Llano.
Nonetheless, there are still products that have not made their debut, though this doesn't mean early models can't land in the hands of market watchers.
In this particular instance, DonanimHaber claims to have somehow acquired an AMD FX 8-core Bulldozer engineering sample.
It is a B1 stepping model with a base clock speed of 3.2 GHz and whose Turbo Core 2.0 can dynamically adjust it depending on how many of the cores are used.
One scenario that can be achieved is for all 8 cores to be drives up to 3.6 GHz, while the other major possibility is for 4 cores to be turned off in order to push the other 4 to 4.2 GHz.
The exact spec sheet of the CPU includes 2 MB of L2 cache per module (for a total of 8 MB) plus an extra 8 MB shared L3.
The benchmarking test was performed on a system that had the Gigabye 990FXA-UD5 990FX motherboard and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 high-end graphics card.
All in all, the 3DMark11 score was P6265, the Fritz Chess result 29.58,14197 kn/sec, PCMark 7 performance was of 3045, Cinevench R10 scored 24434 and, finally, X264 reached 45.39 fps (P2), 136.29 (P1).
In other words, the price rival Intel Core i7 2600K is completely outperformed while the 6-core Gulftown only barely bests it. Then again, that very same Gulftown loses in less multi-threaded applications (3DMark 11 and X264) because of the Bulldozer's 1 GHz Turbo Core.
As for a comparison with AMD's own products, the Phenom II X6 1100T is surpassed, in some cases, by more than 50%.
All in all, if Bulldozer chips really do end up selling for $320, they will be quite the phenomenon when they show up in August and September.