14 DAY TRIAL // While there is still almost a month to go until the first AMD processors built on the Bulldozer architecture make their official entrance, some Chinese users have already managed to get their hands on such chips and even ran some quick benchmarks.
Just as the Bulldozer CPU that was spotted earlier, this processor is also marked as an Engineering Sample, which means that it isn't based on the final silicon revision of the chip.
As a result, the numbers provided by the benchmarks should be taken with a grain of salt, although they could hold some additional insight into Bulldozer's performance.
Moving back to the actual AMD CPU, this is clocked at 3.0GHz, as CPU-Z seems to confirm, and it packs six processing cores as well as 8MB of level 3 cache.
Its product number seems to indicate that the CPU is destined to be used in desktop computers, which suggests this is an Zambezi FX processor.
In addition to the Bulldozer CPU, the system used for running the Fritz Chess and CineBench 11.5 benchmarks, was composed out of an AMD 970-based motherboard and 10GB of DDR3 RAM.
If the performance numbers provided by Fritz Chess are pretty hard to compare with those of other systems, CineBench provides us with some comparison results that put the speed of the machine in perspective.
According to these number, the Bulldozer CPU lags behind Intel's Core i7-960 both in single-threaded and in multi-threaded tasks.
However, what's surprising to see is just how badly Bulldozer scales in multi-threaded apps, where it should have a clear advantage in front of Intel's quad-core CPU.
Most probably this is only a software glitch or a performance bug that was remedied in the newer revisions of Bulldozer, but only time will tell if this is indeed the case.
According to a recent report, AMD is expected to launch its first processors built on the Bulldozer architecture on June 7. (via MyDrivers)
