14 DAY TRIAL // Although the various bits and pieces of information that made their way to the Web do a good job at painting a complete picture about AMD's upcoming Bulldozer processors, the actual performance of the chips has remained pretty much a mystery until now. However, all this changed a short while ago as the first Bulldozer benchmark results have just been posted online.
The benchmarks were run under Linux using the Phoronix Test Suite and were posted on the OpenBenchmarking.org website.
The system used was based on a dual-socket Supermicro H8DGU server motherboard and packed two AMD Interlagos chips, that feature 16 processing cores each, run at 1.8GHz as well as 64GB of DDR3 memory.
Of the many tests that are available inside the Phoronix Test Suite, only a few select benchmarks were run, including C-Ray, Himeno, SciMark 2, Parallel BZIP2 Compression and the Stream memory tests.
Of all the benchmarks run, the most impressive numbers are obtained in the C-Ray multi-threaded ray-tracing benchmark, where the system manages to finish the task in just 25 seconds.
This makes it more than two times faster than a quad-core Intel Core i5 2500K processor, but please bear in mind that the AMD chips used for these benchmarks are actually engineering samples and that the machines used different configurations, operating systems, kernels and compilers.
Interlagos is the name used to designate AMD's most powerful Bulldozer-based server CPU and it packs 12 or 16 processing cores, a quad-channel memory controller as well as up to 16MB of Level 3 cache memory.
The chip uses the same motherboard socket (G34) as the company's current Opteron 6000-series processors and are built by Globalfoundries using the 32nm SOI technology.
An official release date wasn't made public by AMD, but the company expects its new Bulldozer-based server chips to land sometime in the third quarter of 2011. (via Phoronix)
