[Discuss] Next AMD FX-8120 update

[markw at mohawksoft.com (markw at mohawksoft.com)]

I finally got my AMD FX-8120 8 core system and have migrated to it. My old
system, an AMD Athlon Dual Core, 8G RAM is now powered off waiting for a
new job. My initial problem was a bad motherboard and my biggest obstacle
to migration was wife and family and the responsibilities there of.

So, quick summary:
AMD FX-8120 8 core CPU
16 Gig RAM
1TB Boot drive (new)
1.5TB Data drive (removed from previous machine)
Ubuntu 12.04

My first impression was that it is not much faster than the old Dual Core
Athlon when running a single task, but that turned out to be false. It
does seem faster than the previous machine. I only have anecdotal
information.

Does anyone know of a good Linux benchmark?

At work we have IBM servers using XEON Westmere processors, running
similar clock speeds, the inexpensive AMD calculated SHA1 hashes faster
than the XEON. I was surprised.

The big win, of course, is multiple processes and threads. With the extra
RAM, I am able to create good sized virtual machines with multiple CPUs.

The processor itself is interesting. It isn't quite "8" true processors,
but it isn't quite as useless as Intel's "Hyperthreaded" cores either. I
will need to find time time to really test it.