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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 ;)
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.
I am typing this on a Phenom II 6-core system. It is quiet, 45 watts, and at the time (2010) it was only 10-15% slower than an icore5. What did I get that the intel icore5 didn't?
- My whole system including the graphics card was $599! Also an Asus motherboard by the way too and part of their extended warranty boards.
- Non crippled bios where I can run virtualization extensions (most intel mobos turn this off except on icore7s)
- 45 watts
- My ati 5750 works well with the chipset
- the AM3 socket can work with multiple cpus after bios updates.
What the icore5 has
- It is made by intel
- It is 15% faster
- The cost of the cpu alone is 2x the price and I can pretty much include a motherboard as well if you are talking up to icore7s.
An icore7 system costs $1200 at the store. An icore5 gaming system similiarly specced cost $850 and does not include virtualization support to run VMWare or Virtualbox.
The FX systems ... ble. I am not a fan. But for what I do AMD offered a quieter cheaper system that could run VMs of Linux and can upgrade easier. To me my graphics card and hard drive are the bottlenecks. I would rather save money on the cpu. I was so hoping AMD would use this to have a great graphics for tablets and notebooks :-(
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