AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer On Ubuntu Linux

In the past two weeks since AMD publicly launched these new FX-Series CPUs, chances are you have already read extensively about the Bulldozer architecture and other general information from the many Windows-centered tech publications. As such, I will keep that brief here and focus on the areas where Phoronix provides its real value: the Linux aspect and performance.

Here's some slides provided by AMD (again, you may have already seen them elsewhere by now) that offer more of an overview of the Bulldozer architecture itself.

The 32nm SOI Bulldozer CPUs feature nearly two billion transistors and range in clock speed from 2.8GHz to 3.9GHz, with the frequencies going even higher than that with Turbo CORE technology and overclocking headroom even beyond those elevated frequencies. The FX-8150 is a 3.6GHz octal-core CPU that can run at 4.2GHz when using its Turbo CORE mode. There's 8MB of L2 cache and 8MB of L3 cache. The TDP on this unlocked, high-frequency Socket AM3+ CPU is 125 Watts. All of the Bulldozer CPUs offer support for instruction sets like XOP, FMA4, AES and AVX. These instruction sets are supported by the latest Open64 and GCC compiler releases, as will specifically be explored in a later article.