AMD FX Bulldozer CPU Against Intel Core i7-990X

A Czech publication has published the first benchmark scores which compare AMD's upcoming high-performance Bulldozer FX CPUs with Intel's current flagship, the six-core Core i7-990X reports Soft-pedia today.

" 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 results 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.
 
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.

The big problem with these tests is that they are VERY graphics card dependant in 2560x1600 with 8xAA etc etc The tests should have been at lower resolutions so you create CPU dependancy to objectively see how powerfull the processor actually is.

But ah well, time will tell.