Hades.
Forerunner
Not so long ago, we brought you the very first details regarding AMD's Bulldozer performance in comparison with that of an Intel's Core i7 950 processor, and now we have the chance of revealing more information about the chip's potential as the image that stood behind the previous leak was posted online.
Published by the same Turkish website, that goes by the name of donanimhaber, the image appears to be taken out of an AMD press presentation as it carries all the usual markings that one would associate with such a slide.
Taking a good look at it, all sort of details regarding AMD's claim of Bulldozer being 50% faster than the Core i7 950 come to light, including the strange method used by the Sunnyvale-based company to calculate the 50% performance boost.
In addition, AMD build its claims on only three benchmarks, far too few for a fair comparison.
Rendering performance is derived from running the Cinebench 11.5 application, media performance from the TV and movie sub-test found in PCMark and gaming performance from running the CPU sub-test found in 3DMark.
Cincebench is especially unfair since the benchmark is developed in order to take advantage of every thread that it can get its “hands†on, so the eight-core Zambezi CPU has a clear advantage in front of the quad-core Core i7 950.
You could, of course, argue that the Core i7 has HyperThreading support, but the four virtual threads don't scale so well in Cinebench, going from one to eight threads only providing a fivefold boost in performance.
Gaming also seems to witness a large increase in performance over the i7 950, but then again 3DMark 06 is a pretty CPU intensive gaming benchmark.
Bulldozer is AMD's next generation high-performance computing architecture and has been in development for about five years now.
Source: AMD Bulldozer Performance Detailed - Softpedia