AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer 8 Core CPU

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A Look into a Real Path Clearer

At first glance the bulldozer certainly looks the part of a serious contender. Consisting 4 bulldozer modules with 2 cores each for 8MB L2 cache total and 8 MB L3 cache the bulldozer comes prepared and it certainly seems that AMD has listened to consumers desires for more cache. The bulldozer also has two 72-bit wide DDR3 channels, and 4 16-bit hypertransport links as well as extensive enhancements to power efficiency and scalability.

Bulldozer represents Major improvements in:

• Power/area efficiency
• New ISA support
• Scalability
• Modular design
• Significant improvement in performance/watt/mm2

 Power Efficiency

A major theme of the new architecture is power efficiency leading to a “power when you need it, energy saving when you need it” philosophy. AMD accomplishes this through C6, Core P, and C1E states which in essence allow the system to either scale back or completely shut down cores and various other parts of the bulldozer CPU.

Additionally the bulldozer circuits are power-gated dynamically, similarly the TDP is dynamically adjustable per core on the fly through the APM tool and there is extensive flip-flop clock–gating throughout the design. What all this means is that as the user you will see lower temperatures at idle with the ability to have the system automatically wake up and come to full strength upon demand, all this without the loss of data and with significantly lower latency during idle down and wake up periods.

In terms of P states:

• There are three P states
  • Base P state. Frequency of the Part
  • P2  – All cores activated
  • P0 – Half cores activated to maximum frequency

The following graphic explains how P-states works:

What this means for the FX-8150 in review here is that the 8150 will operate in three modes when not overclocked:

• Base P state of 3.6 GHz/core for all 8 cores
• P2 state of 3.9 GHz/core for all 8 cores
• P0 state of 4.2 GHz/core for 4 cores while the remaining cores are at idle or 0 Hz.

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Similarly these power states will be found in all new bulldozer CPU’s. For the overclockers and enthusiasts the immediate question is “does this means that the bulldozer is TDP bound?” and the answer is yes, but by design. AMD has set an uppper TDP limit of 125Watts though any particular bulldozer part can exceed its rated TDP for instances but not over a significant timeframe. The CPU will throttle on a per millisecond basis.

 Bulldozer and its Successors:

Over time AMD will eventually release updates to Bulldozer that enhance its ability and which are targeted towards additional platforms and purposes. These successors are code named: Zambezi, Valencia,  and Interlagos.

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• Zambezi – Targeted towards the Desktop
  • Piledriver will bring new likely bring new socket design that AM3+ cpu’s will be able to move to. Meaning same pin out.
  • Zambezi is for use with AMD 9 series Chipsets
  • Support for DDR 1866
  • Hypertransport up to 5.2 GT/s
  • AM3+ processors compatible
• Valencia – Server
  • Drop in replacement for 4000 series
  • 2 Mem channel – UDIMM, RDIMM, LRDIMM up to DDR 1600
  • 3 HT links up to 6.4 GT/s
  • Advanced platform management
• Interlagos – server
  • Two die in multichip module for 1-4 socket systems
    • 16 core each chip
    • Drop in for 6100 series

 Platform:

As you are all well aware a good platform can make or break the deal so let’s take a refreshed look at AM3+ and the new 990FX.

AM3+ Platform:

• AM3+ socket infrastructure adds:
• Support for CPU voltage loadline
• Increased ILDT current for higher frequency HyperTransport™link
• Increase in DRAM current
• AM3 processors plug-in compatible
• 2 memory channels, unbuffered DIMMs, up to DDR3-1866
• For use with AMD 9-Series chipsets