AMD FX-4100 Bulldozer

The NAS Parallel Benchmarks from NASA were mixed, but generally the i3-2120 managed to outperform the FX-4100.

CLOMP is used for measuring the OpenMP efficiency on multiple CPU cores. The FX-4100 did quite poorly for being a quad-core part and even came in behind the i3-2120, which is a dual-core CPU with Hyper Threading. The quad-core A8-3850 also was more efficient than the FX-4100.

The AMD FX-4100 is currently carrying a retail price of about $130 USD while the Intel Core i3 2120 is coming in right now at $140 USD. In most of the Linux tests that were carried out, this lower-end Sandy Bridge CPU blew AMD's FX-4100 out of the water. The i3-2120 operates at just 3.3GHz and is a dual-core part with Hyper Threading while the FX-4100 operates at 3.6/3.8GHz and is a true quad-core.

There are possible compiler optimizations for the AMD Bulldozer hardware and also the yet-to-be-merged Bulldozer patch for the Linux kernel, but it's unlikely those changes will yield enough performance improvements to become really competitive with the i3-2120 or other Intel hardware. As soon as the Bulldozer kit arrives from AMD, more Linux benchmarks will be carried out, including looking at these other areas. Until then, you can see how your system stacks up to these Bulldozer, Llano, and Sandy Bridge CPUs by installing the Phoronix Test Suite and then running phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1110171-AR-BULLDOZER86 to facilitate a direct (and fully automated) comparison to the tests shown in this article.