This Thursday we take a trip back in time to a day in September 2011 when the overclocking and PC enthusiast community was eagerly awaiting AMD’s brand new Bulldozer architecture processors. Prior to launch only a handful of overclockers had actually managed to get their hands on the new AMD silicon, one of which was Finland’s Sami 'macci' Mäkinen who was actually involved with the launch itself. NordicHardware were fortunate to get an interview with macci in which they managed to confirm several details about Bulldozer specifically related to its overclocking potential.

NordicHardware: "Why don't your CPU's have a coldbug, and will all Bulldozer-samples come without it or does this only apply to handpicked samples?"

Sami Mäkinen: : "I’d need to clarify this from AMD Engineering teams (and not sure if they’d be able to provide much detail to be honest…). But in short (and this is just a personal guess) it likely has to do with the design margins and similar to the Deneb and Thuban CPUs the design appears to be very robust and can withstand even the most extreme cooling solutions. Bulldozer is a very descriptive name in this case.So far I have not seen a sample that would not run under LN2 – so it looks very promising! I have tested around 10 CPUs so far under LN2."

NordicHardware: : "What kind of voltage did you need to reach your 8.429 GHz result, and how many watts this the system pull?"

Sami Mäkinen: : "The sweet spot under LHe cooling and for the CPUZ workload was 2.0125V (CPUZ reported 2.016V). We did not measure the current going to the CPU rail but as usual the CPU power consumption drops dramatically when you move to very low temperatures. For this test the goal was to find out the max. CPUZ result so we didn’t need to load the system heavily. If I’d have to make a guess I’d say we probably stayed within the TDP".

You can catch the full interview with Sami from September 2011here on Nordic Hardware.