Multi-Core Scaling Performance Of AMD's Bulldozer

The FX-8150 Bulldozer scaling with multiple cores is roughly in line with the Core i5 2500K, Core i7 990X, and dual Opteron 2384 results for the selection of NAS Parallel Benchmarks. The Core i7 2630QM continues to be the worst performer.

With the CLOMP benchmark for measuring OpenMP efficiency, the AMD FX-8150 surprisingly does the worst and is even less efficient at OpenMP scaling than the Core i7 2630QM Mobile Sandy Bridge. However, in the real-world of using the OpenMP-based GraphicsMagick, the Bulldozer performance was more favorable and in line with the other hardware.

The AMD FX-8150 doesn't scale quite as well as a true eight-core configuration (i.e. the dual quad-core Opterons or up to six-cores with the Intel Gulftown Extreme), but for most multi-core workloads the Bulldozer CPU is generally competitive with the competing processors -- it was certainly much better than the Core i7 2630QM Sandy Bridge with its four cores plus Hyper Threading. The next AMD Bulldozer Linux results to be published will likely be the first round of compiler benchmarks (GCC, Open64, LLVM).