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AMD FX-8350 Review: Does Piledriver Fix Bulldozer's Flaws?
An anonymous reader writes "AMD just officially took the wraps off Vishera, its next generation of FX processors. Vishera is Piledriver-based like the recently-released Trinity APUs, and the successor to last year's Bulldozer CPU architecture. The octo-core flagship FX-8350 runs at 4.0 GHz and is listed for just $195. The 8350 is followed by the 3.5 GHz FX-8320 at $169. Hexa-core and quad-core parts are also launching, at $132 and $122, respectively. So how does Vishera stack up to Intel's lineup? The answer to that isn't so simple. The FX-8350 can't even beat Intel's previous-generation Core i5-2550K in single-threaded applications, yet it comes very close to matching the much more expensive ($330), current-gen Core i7-3770K in multi-threaded workloads. Vishera's weak point, however, is in power efficiency. On average, the FX-8350 uses about 50 W more than the i7-3770K. Intel aside, the Piledriver-based FX-8350 is a whole lot better than last year's Bulldozer-based FX-8150 which debuted at $235. While some of this has to do with performance improvements, that fact that AMD is asking $40 less this time around certainly doesn't hurt either. At under $200, AMD finally gives the enthusiast builder something to think about, albeit on the low-end."
Reviews are available at plenty of other hardware sites, too. Pick your favorite: PC Perspective, Tech Report, Extreme Tech, Hot Hardware, AnandTech, and [H]ard|OCP.
90+% of my CPU is idle time.
How much power does the new chip use at idle and how does that compare to Intel?
50W at the top end means about $25/yr if I was running it 24/7. But since typical desktop is idle, what is the power difference there??
And yes, I don't care about single thread performance as I care about multithread performance. Single thread performance has been good enough for desktop for almost a decade, and the only CPU intensive task I do is running those pesky `make -j X` commands. No, not emerging world or silly things like that ;)
Finally something positive from AMD, while I'm not interested in this CPU since I'm a gamer, the lack of competition kept the Intel CPU price stagnant. This new AMD CPU seems to have some strength in multi-threaded applications. But then again, a 2 year old o/c Intel i5 eats any game you give him, while the same can't be said for a same priced video card. So Intel is not all that evil (watching AMD marketing troll campaign for Bulldozer on the other hand made me hate AMD).
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
I put together an 8way,32GB machine (no local storage) for $400 to play with ESXi. Courtesy of the freebie VMWare download and a reasonably priced 8way machine, I can get into some pretty serious VM work without spending a ton of dough. I don't need massive performance for a test lab.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
These chips "excel" at big, heavily threaded workloads. Which is to say that they can beat similarly priced Intel chips that are simply up-clocked laptop parts. Move up to a hyperthreaded 3770K (still a laptop part) and Vishera usually loses. Overclock that 3770K to be on-par with the Vishera clocks while still using massively less power than Vishera and the 3770K wins practically every benchmark.
Unfortunately, if you *really* care about those workloads (as in money is on the line) then Intel has the LGA-2011 parts that are in a completely different universe than Vishera, including using less total power and being much much better at performance/watt to boot. I'm not even talking about the $1000 chips either, I'm talking about the sub $300 3820 that wins nearly every multi-threaded benchmark, not to mention that $500 3930K that wins every one by a wide margin.
So if you want to play games (which is what 90% of people on Slashdot really care about): Intel is price competitive with AMD and you'll have a lower-power system to boot. If you *really* care about heavily-multithreaded workloads: Intel is price competitive because the initial purchase price turns into a rounding error compared to the potential performance upside and long-term power savings you get with Intel.
Vishera is definitely better than Bulldozer, but AMD still has a long long way to go in this space.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Does it still share a floating point unit between two normal cores? For HPC users, that was the worst possible thing to hear about AMD's Bulldozer product. Almost everything in HPC needs good floating point performance and AMD didn't deliver, thus if you buy AMD you have to buy twice the number of cores just to get the FPU count up.
New AMD processor, higher clocks than the last one but no massive improvements performance-wise. Still rocks at multi-threaded, integer-only workloads, still sucks at single-threaded or floating-point performance, still uses a huge amount of power. AMD giving up on the high end, their top-end parts are priced against the i5 series, not the i7. Since Intel's overpricing stuff, they're still roughly competitive. Might be good for server stuff, maybe office desktops if they can get the power down, but not looking good for gaming. Overall mood seems to be "AMD isn't dead yet, but they've given up on first place".
There. Now you don't need to read TFAs.
I've read through some of the reviews. It looks like a nice CPU with a bit too high power usage for my taste.
And please take benchmark results with a pinch of salt- most of them are compiled with Intel compiler, and will have lower results on AMD CPUs just because Intel compiler will disable a lot of optimizations on AMD CPUs.
I don't know of any site which would have Java application server, MySQL/PostgreSQL, python/perl/ruby, apache/PHP, GCC/llvm benchmarks under Linux. Video transcoding or gaming on Windows is really skewed and nowhere near to what I do with my machine.
--Coder
I could love AMD again if they allowed Opteron overclocking.
What were they thinking? The more cores, the more memory bandwidth you need.
This is what AMD gets for outsourcing its engineering. (look up articles from 2007)
If anyone has doubts or thinks this is trolling, go see the benchmarks for yourself.
http://www.overclock3d.net/reviews/cpu_mainboard/amd_vishera_fx8350_piledriver_review/3
Here are a set of benchmarks that are more centered on the Linux world from phoronix and are thus a little less prone to intel compiler discrimination. The results seem more realistic: better and worse and similar to an i7 at different work, still hard on power usage, low purchase price.
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
The new Trinity, and now these FX Procs, are perfect for "the 99%," that is to say for what 99% of people do with their machines: surf the web, check email, maybe do some photo editing or piecing together home movies.
They're cheap, reasonably fast, and support all the latest extensions and optimizations. Plus, even for enthusiast prosumers who want to screw around with things like virtualization, you can get into the IOMMU space cheaply with AMD, which is nice for a platform like ESXi that has a mature PCI passthrough implementation.
I think the Trinity A-10 does really hit the sweet spot for most consumers. It has reasonably fast processing and reasonably fast GPU in a ~$130 package. If you're putting a box together on the cheap, it becomes quite compelling.
CPU's tends not to be the bottle neck these days its either the hard drive or slow internet connection. At work I priced up some AMD classroom PC's and in bulk we could have given each pc a 128GB SSD(all user work kept on a SAN and system image is about 60-80GB once MSI's have been deployed) with the savings of going AMD but as the boss had never used AMD and reviews keep going on about how intel is faster he went for a mix of I5 and I7 intel based pc's with little ram so as to keep the cost down and as a result startup times are no better than the old intel core duo pc's they replaced. To top it off the boss now has my demo AMD setup as 'its the fastest PC' admittedly that’s only due to a SSD not the CPU but I do get his I7. How do I find a excuse to put a large RAID of SSD's in it?
a CPU for the low-end enthusiast. Quite the niche market.
As Hobbes predicted, language has become a complete impediment to understanding. Vishera Piledriver Trinity Bulldozer FX-8350 i5-2550K i7-3770K.
I read phoronix a lot these days. I find more technical news in there than in Slashdot.
However, their benchmarks are often flawed. For example they did a Linux scheduler benchmark recently which measured throughput (average this or that) and not latency/interactivity (response times), which was totally useless. Well, ok, you can consider it a test checking for throughput regressions in interactivity oritiented schedulers, but it did not measure interactivity at all.
And regarding their Vishera benchmark, they measured most of their standard stuff, mostly scientific calculation, video/audio encoding, image processing, rendering. I very rarely do any of this.
The developer related benchmarks they had were Linux kernel compilation times (Vishera won), and you might count OpenSSL as well. They didn't do PostgreSQL, they didn't benchmark different programming languages, nor application servers, nor office applications, nor anything that would really interest me. I wish someone would measure Netbeans/Eclipse and other IDE performance.
And anyway, did you notice that AMD usually does much better in Phoronix reviews than in Anandtech/Toms Hardware/whatever sites? That's because Phoronix doesn't use Intel Compiler nor Windows, so results are much less skewed.
--Coder
More heat equals louder fans. and more dust on the vents.
The limosine tax imposed by our ISP overlords is a couple orders of magnitude more painful.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
AMD FX-8350 Review: Does Piledriver Fix Bulldozer's Flaws?
No. It still guzzles power like crazy compared to Sandy/Ivy Bridge, and its single-threaded performance still sucks royally. (And that's still very important since many, many programs cannot and will not ever support full multithreading.)
Man I really want AMD to win!
I am typing this on a phenom II which is a better chip in my opinion and fast at the time in (unfortunately in 2010 standards). But these things run well over 130 watts, are loud with huge freaking fans, 4.4 ghz, and it seems AMD is trying to pump out as much speed as possible to beat intel's lowest end chips.
Just call it pentium IV 2.0 while we are at it? I am not a fan of intel because I run vmware and hate that intel cripples its chips and the bios to exclude virtualization on all but the most expensive units. I hate the cost of a high end icore 7 which in 2010 was only 10 - 15% faster than a Phenom II but cost 400% more where I can buy a whole system for the cost of a single intel core 7 extreme.
Well gentlemen. Expect dark days ahead and a return to $1000 desktops, $500 chips, and virtualization only available on xeon chips by next year. :-(
With AMD junk status it is bound to happen now since these chips can't match intels offering.
http://saveie6.com/
Get rid of the l2 and l3 cache and beef up the l1 cache or just improve upon it. L2 cache was created to fill in for the speed gab between the cpu and ram. Now ram is running about 2.6ghz(multiple data transfers 1 clock) with hypertransport or quickpath buses.
Low end would be fine but it would need to be low power there too. Ivy Bridge CPUs are great at sipping power, particularly the dual core variety. So if what I'm doing is just real light usage like web surfing and so on, I'm better off with that.
For heavier usage, well the Intel CPUs are better particularly at floating point calculations which is what most heavy performance is these days, at least on desktops. All the programs I can think of that I have which hit the CPU real heavy, are doing FP stuff, not so much integer.
I just don't see what this is better for, unfortunately.
AMD is getting spanked badly in per-core performance. AMD was actually quite competitive a while back. From the benchmarks it looks like Intel had a very substantial leap in per-core performance with one generation of their core architecture. What did they do that made such a huge gain? And it's not that they're ahead on fab process. The single core per-clock performance jumped. What's up with that? How'd they do it?
I have an outdoor porch light that seems to eat florescent bulbs. I've only had the LED bulb in for a few months, but so far it's doing fine.
Too bad Intel had to go an stick Insider in all their chips. That's the only reason I am going with AMD this time around.
Same here. For several years, incandescents and CFLs in my front porch light would die almost every time there was a big storm, several times a year. Maybe thermal stress. I replaced the fixture, but the problem continued. Finally bought a 60W-equivalent LED several months ago and it's still fine after several storms. It's the one place I've found an LED is definitely worth it.
intel pci-e io still sucks in most of there chips
You should quit repeating their memes. Do you not understand that by saying "incandescent ban" you further their agenda? Those words are specifically framed to automatically generate an emotional response in people. Just by saying those words, you've lost the game.
I guarantee I can find a box of incandescent in any hardware/grocery store (hint: bottom shelf ).
When you call an 8 core 4GHz CPU low-end.
Intel do "TDP when 100% load" and AMD do "TDP at maximum", in the latter case, finding out how much by design the TDP would be given a psychotic test case.
AMD has always been better relatively on multicore than Intel, but at the expense of each cores' performance.
Incandescents that are used infrequently are no better than LEDs that are used infrequently. In the latter case you may not quite make your investment back quick enough to make it financially worth it, but that doesn't make incandescents better to use. Just no different.
As someone who is pretty into this field, I find it somewhat surprising that no company has taken advantage of user trends.Perhaps it is just too expensive.
I mean 64 bit and multi-threaded stuff has been out for some time. I mean a pretty long time. However typically, a user is still a single core user. Games, applications rarely seem programed to take advantage of multiple cores. Mostly the multiple cores are used by background processes, or running multiple applications at the same time. Most however don't really do all that much of even that. If you really wanted performance gains, you would think you would look at this usage and design something that fit that model.
Like one core that is single and very fast. It would be used for 80% of everything a typical user would throw at it. Then you have several cores of low power slower speed that can pick up any spillover caused by mutiple applications, or the few applications designed for multicore use. I mean in many cases, you are buying a 4 core processor, which is using one core 80% of the time while the other 3 sit idle anyway (and they are all the same speed). Anyway logically it doesn't make any sense, however I conceed that likely it is a manufacturing issue more than anything else (i.e. they could build it, but it would be too expensive). Still for a nimble company looking for a competitive advantage, it seems a smarter route to explore than simply throwing more shitty cores that aren't being use anyway at a problem.