There has been a lot of discussion in the past two weeks concerning AMD's new FX-Series processors and the Bulldozer architecture. In particular, with the Bulldozer architecture consisting of "modules" in which each has two x86 engines, but share much of the rest of the processing pipeline with their sibling engine; as such, the AMD FX-8150 eight-core CPU only has four modules. In this article is a look at how well the Bulldozer multi-core performance scales when toggling these different modules. The multi-core scaling performance is compared to AMD's Shanghai, Intel's Gulftown and Sandy Bridge processors.

Each Bulldozer module consists of two x86 out-of-order processing engines, two 128-bit FMAC units, and two integer cores, but shares the fetch/decode stage, the floating-point scheduler, the L2 cache, and other parts of the module. Some have loosely compared this to Intel's Hyper Threading technology. Below are slides provided by AMD that detail the AMD Bulldozer model.

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