NDA on AMD’s new FX CPU series “Bulldozer” was lifted yesterday and a lot of reviews are now available in the Internet. It looks like the new CPU architecture has its potential but it was released unfinished. Single threaded execution is lagging behind AMD’s old CPU architecture and the sheer size of the chip looks like a bad deal for AMD. Bigger chips are more expensive to manufacture and therefore AMD will have hard time to compete with Intel in pricing. Power consumption seems to be on a par with Intel i7 and i5 when in idle but jumps as high as 230W while Intel processors stay around 132W. This means more heat and more noise which is always a bad thing.

I was hoping fresh competition from AMD with their new architecture but it looks like they got a miss. Hopefully issues will be fixed and AMD’s new flagship shall shine. There is always hope..