So you're okay with comparing it to Ivy but not Sandy? Is that supposed to make it better?
Benchmark bomb.
Note how close the 2500K is despite the mixed workload (both integer and FP) and the fact that the BD can't seem to pull away from a 45nm Thuban with 6 independent cores.
Aaaand there's your reason why. Poor IPC and clock speeds hurt it in the long run regardless of work load, making BD's strong suits seem weaker and it's weak points look even worse.
Now I know what you're thinking, who cares about single-threaded performance? Well, pretty much everyone, but let's consider multi-threaded performance without much of a cache impact (remember BD has atrociously slow cache)
and it's still shit. Considering the added threads here it should technically be doing better than the Thuban and the 2500K both and by a considerable margin but it doesn't win the benchmark it should have won...again.
That's right, folks. They managed to make the cache slower and the clock speeds have essentially stayed stagnant thus accessing that L2 cache (which is considerably slower than the Thuban/Deneb, L2 being the worst) a bad idea.
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4955/41731.png
For anyone who knows AMD chip architecture, this last one isn't surprising as the L3 speeds are always asynch and slow.
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4955/41689.png
Now here BD would have won by a large margin despite those hampered clock speeds and IPC if it had more FPUs, but it doesn't so it lost again.
As I alluded to earlier, single threaded performance is going to be a bit of a disappointment with Bulldozer and here you get the first dose of reality. Even considering its clock speed and Turbo Core advantage, the FX-8150 is slower than the Phenom II X6 1100T. Intel's Core i5 2500K delivers nearly 50% better single threaded performance here than the FX-8150
That's a whole 50% per ALU/FPU for that workload and it still can only catch up despite twice as many ALUs and even # of FPUs
But hold on, it's not all bad.
As I mentioned earlier, these are the types of benchmarks you want to show and with good reason: they are almost entirely integer-based and scale well with the core count. But this isn't great news because of how close the 2600K is despite having half the number of integer cores. Considering Intel's hyperthreading is ~30% efficient (best case scenario) and CMT tax is only ~20% (worst case scenario) the 8150 should be pounding on the 2600K in this test. Yet it doesn't because of poor IPC and clock speeds.
Same thing here except it loses. The Thuban does poorly here because this benchmark takes advantage of newer instruction sets the Thuban lacks, otherwise I think it would likely have won this.
Speaking of AVX
Now I'm finally impressed. The FPUs aren't as broken as we thought and can actually perform quite well but still not nearly well enough to make it count and make up for the deficiencies in other areas (it's helped by being partially mixed and not an entirely FP dominated workload). AVX performance is definitely one of its strong suits, along with idle power due to very good gating, and their turbo which is more efficient than Intel's. Unfortunately, that's pretty much it as it has far more shortcomings than it does advantages
Like this, for instance
Chiropteran, I love AMD. I do. Really. They make amazing GPUs that are far better than nVidia's (imo) and I'm typing this on a Deneb 955, but you've got to admit they made a catastrophic failure with Bulldozer here. Defending it against me or against anyone with more than 2 brain cells isn't going to do you any good. Sorry