AMD FX-Series Bulldozer CPU Benchmarked Against Intel Core i7-990X
After managing to get their hands on an engineering sample of an FX-Series processor, a Czech publication has published the first benchmark scores which compare AMD's upcoming high-performance CPUs with Intel's current flagship, the six-core Core i7-990X.
The comparative benchmarks are included in a review of the AMD 990FX chipset which was published recently by the PCTuning website.
Both processors included in the test were overclocked to 4GHz and were paired with two Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 graphics cards operating in SLI in order to asses their gaming performance.
Judging by the results provided by PCTuning, the two systems seem to perform pretty similarly, except for a few cases in which the Intel platform takes the lead. However, this happens in just a few games, namely DiRT 2, H.A.W.X. 2 and Resident Evil 5, and the results are pretty close to one another.
Sadly, no information about the FX-Series CPU used for this test was provided, so we don't know exactly how many cores it packs or what's its L2 and L3 cache size or default clocks speed.
When taking a look at these benchmarks, one also has to keep in mind the fact that the Bulldozer CPU used isn't based on the final silicon version, which means that retail units may feature an important boost in performance.
There is also the question of drivers, as the AMD platform was tested with the Nvidia 275.36 beta version since the GPU maker hasn't released a final SLI-enabled driver for AMD 900-series chipsets.
Unlike AMD's previous designs, Bulldozer will use a new approach that relies on a modular architecture. Each module includes two processing cores, as well as other components, and these can be paired together to form CPUs with up to eight computing cores.
The first chips built on this architecture were expected to arrive in June and targeted the desktop market, but at this year's Computex AMD announced that the first Zambezi FX CPUs won't arrive until August or September of 2011.
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