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AMD Making a 5 GHz 8-Core Processor At 220 Watts
Vigile writes "It looks like the rumors were true; AMD is going to be selling an FX-9590 processor this month that will hit frequencies as high as 5 GHz. Though originally thought to be an 8-module/16-core part, it turns out that the new CPU will have the same 4-module/8-core design that is found on the current lineup of FX-series processors including the FX-8350. But, with an increase of the maximum Turbo Core speed from 4.2 GHz to 5.0 GHz, the new parts will draw quite a bit more power. You can expect the the FX-9590 to need 220 watts or so to run at those speeds and a pretty hefty cooling solution as well. Performance should closely match the recently released Intel Core i7-4770K Haswell processor so AMD users that can handle the 2.5x increase in power consumption can finally claim performance parity."
That 220W figure is astonishing and makes me feel bad for AMD. They are getting kicked in the balls not because of any merits or demerits of their design but simply because they don't have access to the advanced process technology that Intel does.
Done it. It was fun and functional, but you have to do everything you can to keep the condensation out. Fast a hell tho!
Yeah but how much was the 4 core Intel? And you can probably buy that 8 core for $150 or less now if you watch the sales. I'm running the Thuban X6 and what did 6 cores cost me? $105 shipped, if you compare like to like the only chip I could get from Intel at $105 was the Pentium Dual core which the X6 outperforms so in that case the bang for the buck squarely landed in the AMD camp.
The problem with the X8s (well other than the arch, see my previous post with a link on why the BD/PD/EX platform is AMD's netburst) is they simply cost too much to make, for every X8 that comes out with all functioning core they probably get 2 dozen X4s or X6s thanks to bad cores so THAT is where the bang for the buck is, although if given a choice I'd take a Deneb or Thuban over Bulldozer any day of the week.
But if you are strictly wanting the most bang for your bucks and like most of us don't have unlimited budgets the best bets would probably be the Athlon X4 for $67 although for an extra $8 I'd probably go for the Phenom II X4 for $75 and for more than 4 cores the best bang is probably the FX6100 for $99 or the Phenom II 1035T X6 for $106. I think in the benches the Thuban beats the FX6100 but both are good deals. Nice thing about the 1035T is I have one and have sold several and with a low end gaming board like the Asrock boards they have a hell of a lot of OCing room, before deciding I didn't want to deal with the temps I had mine up to nearly 3GHz with a turbocore of nearly 3.5GHz. I probably could have gone higher with a better cooler but my apt gets hot enough as it is without adding a major OC to my system.
As you can see though you can still get crazy cheap deals on the AMD side if you just know where to look. These chips have more than enough power to do anything your average person is gonna want to do with a PC, heck my youngest is gaming on a 3.4Ghz Athlon X3 and is quite happy with the performance and with my 1035T I can game AND do a transcode AND burn a DVD at the same time with no slow downs so I would say I'm getting my $105 out of it.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
basically, the 8-core AMD was slower performance-wise the 4-core Intel with the AMD running a few MHz faster
Take all benchmarks with a grain of salt. While Intel has been generally winning for awhile now, that doesn't really mean AMD is completely inferior. With like chips there are certain things a modern AMD will out-perform Intel on, such as single threaded tasks. Intel will generally smoke AMD on multithreaded tasks, though. There is also cost, while AMD might be 10% less benchmark happy than a like Intel chip, it generally is over 25% less expensive, and will generally run without need to buy a new costly motherboard.
My last big upgrade, several years ago now, the price difference between the AMD (Phenom II 4x 965 Black) and Intel (i7 something or another) was hugely dramatic, considering the fact that I'd need a new motherboard and new RAM on top of the CPU. It was about $300-400 difference (fully upgrading 8gb of RAM, with a new mobo). I took the 10% performance hit, happily. For enthusiast CPUs, you'd best take the hit, and use the cash on a better GPU.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
No, this particular story is analogous to a 2004-era story about Intel releasing a new Pentium IV at yet-higher clocks. The current story is about a clock ramp, but the overarching narrative is the same.
The Bulldozer architecture is fundamentally broken, this time due to simple negligence (mainly in management) rather than a faulty assumption. The only way to get reasonable performance from it is to clock it to high speeds, which gives very diminishing returns. Power consumption scales with the *cube* of the clock speed, so you pretty quickly run into a power/heat wall. They clocked the early ones pretty aggressively already, but at the cost of power and heat (and thus, noise). But it's the same story as the Pentium IV - the smart people are on something else.
AMD seems to be trying to put itself back together. Hopefully the PS4/Xb1 wins will give them enough of a cash flow to keep them solvent until they can get a new architecture out, or at least hammer out the IPC problems with Bulldozer. On the bright side, Intel's been distracted by ARM - they threw away a year's lead on performance to chase idle power draw, which should give AMD a bit of time to catch up on performance on the desktop.
On the bright side, Intel's been distracted by ARM - they threw away a year's lead on performance to chase idle power draw, which should give AMD a bit of time to catch up on performance on the desktop.
In the short term, this appears to be a good thing. In the long term, this is very bad for AMD.
The world is moving to low-powered portables. The future of consumer computing will not be on the desk or lap, but in the hand. Workstations will still use desktop chips, but Intel pretty much has that market cornered.
The low-powered, RISC space is where AMD needs to go. It doesn't necessarily have to be ARM. Instead, there's a market for low-powered x86, which is where Intel is going with Haswell. AMD needs to get ahead of the game and create something that is capable of power sipping (which obviously won't be x86), but is also capable of running legacy x86 code at reasonable speeds.
Basically, they need to create a migration path away from x86, which will never be as efficient as ARM and thus has no chance in the portable space. Yes, Intel tried that with Itanic, but they were aiming in the wrong direction (servers).
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
I suggest that it is about time programmers started getting used to coding in assembly once again.
You can give up right there. The days of humans getting 100x more efficiency out of a CPU using assembler rather than a higher level language are over. Optimizing compilers are able to devise efficiencies at large scale/detail that a human can at this point. Enterprise level software requiring millions of lines of code are just too large to be optimizable by one human writing in assembler. Speed efficiencies with out of order execution, deep pipelines consumer CPUs will be better utilized by compilers able to make better predictive arrangement of code.
Don't get me wrong. You'll always be able to find ONE "John Henry" that will be able to outcode the "stream compiler". But you can't build a world economy on one programmer. And forget about finding COMPETENT assembler programmers. The people you need to extract these kind of efficiencies are like finding prima ballerinas. Sadly, the world's economy needs more mediocre programmers to generate more working code, and more higher-level, software engineers to implement new solutions for problems addressable by a computer.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon