AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer On Ubuntu Linux

With the heavily multi-threaded C-Ray ray-tracing benchmark when built from the stock GCC 4.6.1 compiler, the eight-core AMD FX-8150 edged past the four-core Intel Core i5 2500K by a very small margin. The Intel Gulftown CPUs (Core i7 970 and Core i7 990X Extreme) with their six cores plus Hyper Threading were much faster than AMD's current highest-end desktop CPU.

With the Smallpt benchmark, which is another test profile that's multi-threaded very well, the FX-8150 was significantly faster than the Core i5 2500K. The Gulftown CPUs remained the fastest, but the FX-8150 did very well with this multi-core path tracing benchmark compared to the Core i5 2500K.

While the FX-8150 did fairly well in the first two tests that were multi-threaded, the POV-Ray 3.6.1 release is only single-threaded. With a single-thread workload, the FX-8150 Bulldozer is disappointing. The FX-8150 was only slightly faster than the FX-4100 (just enough due to its slightly higher clock speed) and even ended up being slower than the Intel Core i5 2400S Sandy Bridge. Intel's Gulftown CPUs also are not too kind to single-thread work under Linux.