AMD Bulldozer FX has been a massive PR triumph

Whatever AMD's Bulldozer does against the might of Intel's Sandybridge products in the launch reviews, FX has – without doubt – been a massive PR triumph. KitGuru sips Chardonnay and nibbles on a canapé – all in the interests of science.

While everyone would love to be in the media with a huge marketing spend, bashing seven shades of something out of their competitors – the cold hard reality is that almost nothing can stand in the way of intelligent, well executed PR.

Great PR is not about the spend or the product. It's about finding something that sparks the imagination of the public.

Example?  If you put the raw specification of the average iMac on a bit of paper, no one would buy it. You'd choose Windows every time and Apple would have been out of business a long time ago.

So that brings us to AMD's Bulldozer FX processor.

At stock speed or with ‘normal' levels of overclocking, the FX fails to shine. The actual expression KitGuru used was “…at £220 the market is just too competitive right now…”.

So here's the kicker.  Why has the chip sold out everywhere, with more advanced orders than anyone expected for a new chip launch?

Simple. It has sparked the imagination.

By giving leading press an exclusive, early access to monster overclocking sessions – AMD ensured that everyone knew that Bulldozer FX had plenty of overhead.

Once the company's own viral video had gone live, showing the FX passing 8.4GHz, the fate of the chip had been sealed.

It's not often you can accuse AMD of delivering this kind of global PR coup, but in the case of the Bulldozer FX, the gleam from the 8GHz record has guaranteed that enthusiasts across the world want to get their mits on the new 8-core architecture, just to see how close they can get with more mundane cooling solutions.

KitGuru says: The O/C headroom is clearly there. Let's see how close civilians can get to the magic 8Gs on 8 cores.

Comment below or in the KitGuru forum.

Become a Patron!