This is the discussion page for the amd/microarchitectures/bulldozer page.

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Objective or opinion?

The Bulldozer page has a lot of good, in depth, technical information.

The Bulldozer page also has opinion stated as fact; "incorrectly marketed as an 8-core CPU for the AM3+ socket"

It can be debated whether it is a true 8 core CPU or not, but being from before the days of the FPU even being internal to the CPU, this debate is academic at best. The 486SX was not a zero core CPU because it did not include an FPU.

"Benchmarks quickly demonstrated that, despite Bulldozer's high clock speeds (an overclocking marketing stunt reached 8GHz on LN2) and correspondingly high power consumption, its overall performance was generally no better and often worse than K10. Some aspects of this improved slightly with better OS support, but there were fundamental problems that no mere software tweaks could overcome. Compared to Bulldozer's immediate competitor, Sandy Bridge, the advantage was clearly with the latter, especially for games which, at the time, rarely used more than two or three threads effectively and thrived on low memory latency."

I've got a Phenom II x6, FX 6300, Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge and this entire paragraph is just false. It is true that initial benchmarks did not favor the FX on it's release and it often traded blows with the Phenom II. The difference, however, is in how they age. As software has changed over the years, OS and programs, the Phenom II has aged while the FX has improved, Piledriver more so than Bulldozer, yet both are still viable on the low end where the Phenom II is most certainly showing it's age. The closing paragraph offers a "long term perspective" of sorts without the benefit of actually having a long term perspective. AVX support, amongst other things, has extended the life of the FX quite well compared to the Phenom II. Programs taking advantage of multiple hardware threads also run better on the FX, which now has it in the unique situation of playing modern sequels to games far better than the lightly threaded originals.