this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
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Except anything Bulldozer-derived, heh. Those were more expensive and less performant than the Phenom II CPUs and Llano APUs.
To be fair, I upgraded my main desktop directly from a Phenom II X4 840(?) to a Ryzen 1700x without owning any Bulldozer stuff in between.
(I did later buy a couple of used Opteron 6272s, but that's different for multiple reasons.)
I've got an FX 8350, sure AMD fell behind during that time but it was by no means a bad CPU imo. Main PC's got a 7800X3D now but my FX system is still working just fine to this day, especially since upgrading to an SSD and 16GB RAM some years ago. It can technically even run Cyberpunk 2077 with console like frame rates on high settings.
I mean… It functioned as a CPU.
But a Phenom II X6 outperformed it sometimes, single thread and multithreaded. That's crazy given Pildriver’s two generation jump and huge process/transistor count advantage. Power consumption was awful in any form factor.
Look. I am an AMD simp. I will praise my 7800X3D all day. But there were a whole bunch of internet apologist for Bulldozer back then, so I don’t want to mince words:
It was bad.
Objectively bad, a few software niches aside. Between cheaper Phenoms and the reasonably priced 2500K/4670K, it made zero financial sense 99% of the time.
Bulldozer was AMD's Pentium 4.
Even down to the questionable marketing.