Final words and conclusion
Alright, conclusion time, and this is not going to be easy to explain -- a tough one really. The Octacore AMD FX 8150 processor surprised me positively in some ways, yet bewilders me in others.
AMD has set the strategy to pursue processors with as many CPU cores as possible. The Bulldozer design is scalable, very scalable, meaning they are focusing on more CPU cores. The benefit here is that massively threaded applications really like that very much. Look at the Handbrake (multi-threaded video transcoding application) results and content creation with MAXON's animation software CINEMA 4D. It's there where the processor really flexes its muscles.
To put it very simple, the hardware needs the software in order to shine. However, the problem remains that most software anno 2011 certainly doesn't multi-thread as well as we all would have hoped.
Most applications go for two, maybe four cores. It's already hard to utilize six threads simultaneously, let alone eight. As such, per-core performance is much more important than more processor cores.
That is a matter of time though, I mean we had the single core to dual-core revolution, quickly followed by four, six and thus now eight cores. So where multithreaded applications are programmed right AMD really starts to shine with the FX series.
So the opposite effect is that with applications that prefer say two CPU threads and thus utilize only two cores... well that's where the FX series has a really hard time as the per core performance starts to lack significantly opposed to the competition.
You have been able to see that the FX 8150 mostly is competing with the Core i5 2500 (which costs 180 EUR by the way). Once multithreading kicks in well, performance quickly rises and you'll see Core i7 2600 (260 EUR) performance. Surprisingly enough even the Phenom II X6 1100T (170 EUR) stands ground and is mostly on par with the FX 8150 a lot of the time, that complicates things even more. So where do we need to position the FX 8150 then? I mean, this is supposed to be AMD's fastest processor.
In games we see exactly the same thing. We specifically took two titles to show you that difference. The older title, Far Cry 2, is where we can see a performance hit, in fact CPU limitation kicks in as the per core performance of the FX 8150 can't keep up with the graphics card (CPU bottleneck). A Core i7 2500 or 2600, though with four cores have better per core performance, hence you'll see better performance.