I say reasonably well because AMD’s Llano and Bulldozer chips have been underwhelming performers thus far. The company decided to design a new architecture that focuses on conserving resources, improving power efficiency and reducing heat generation. Its a good idea on paper compared to Intel’s approach of continuing the growth of Moore’s law using 3D-layered transistors, but in reality it strangles single-thread performance and requires higher clock speeds to match anything from Intel’s stable. In addition, there’s not a lot to differentiate CPUs from the same family. In gaming benchmarks, AMD’s FX-4100 performs similarly to the FX-8120, with some margin of improved frame rates in certain games thanks to the higher clock speeds of the quad-core chip.

Left to Right: Llano, Trinity and Phenom, three distant cousins

Yes, despite that some people say AMD’s FX-8120 is a octo-core chip, its really four Bulldozer modules with two single-core chips per module, squashed together and forced to share cache, floating point units and bandwidth. Likewise for the quad-core chip, which has two modules and really can’t contend with even Intel’s Sandy Bridge-based Pentiums. For laptops and desktops, AMD promised that Trinity would improve performance by 15% overall and prove a worthy upgrade from the Llano chips of old. Lets see how they’ve delivered.

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