AMD Releases New Tonga GPU, Lowers 8-core CPU To $229

Vigile (99919) writes AMD looks to continue addressing the mainstream PC enthusiast and gamer with a set of releases into two different component categories. First, today marks the launch of the Radeon R9 285 graphics card, a $250 option based on a brand new piece of silicon dubbed Tonga. This GPU has nearly identical performance to the R9 280 that came before it, but includes support for XDMA PCIe CrossFire, TrueAudio DSP technology and is FreeSync capable (AMD's response to NVIDIA G-Sync). On the CPU side AMD has refreshed its FX product line with three new models (FX-8370, FX-8370e and FX-8320e) with lower TDPs and supposedly better efficiency. The problem of course is that while Intel is already sampling 14nm parts these Vishera-based CPUs continue to be manufactured on GlobalFoundries' 32nm process. The result is less than expected performance boosts and efficiency gains. For a similar review of the new card, see Hot Hardware's page-by-page unpacking.

Comments

This urge I get sometimes

[i kan reed]

Sometimes I want to send headlines of this sort back to 1998 and see how the people of that era would react.

I PC game, and have zero reason to upgrade

[sinij]

I PC game, and for the first time in decades have zero reasons to upgrade. My rig is now about 2 years old and runs every title at max setting. Unless I upgrade to 4K monitor (and I see no reason to) my PC should last me another 3-4 years before I get bumped to medium settings.

I just can't justify upgrading everything for messily 10% gain. As such, both Intel and AMD have to work harder on backwards compatibility. I might buy new CPU when it goes on sale if I also don't have to upgrade motherboard and RAM.

Re:I PC game, and have zero reason to upgrade

[LordWabbit2]

Couldn't agree more - gone are the days when you needed to upgrade every six months, now I only feel the need to upgrade every ~3 years. RAM is so cheap I stuck another 16gb in my machine just for the hell of it. I don't bother writing anything to DVD either, I just buy another external HDD - in fact I am using the SATA port for my main SSD, the DVD drive is not even plugged in anymore.

Re:I PC game, and have zero reason to upgrade

[i kan reed]

2 years old puts you on par with the latest generation of console hardware, which is what AAA developers target, and indie devs tend to focus more on whatever idea/style they're trying to show than pushing polygons.

In a year or two, when it becomes clear that there are certain kinds of things that can only be done on that years' hardware(maybe something physics related, or AI, or as a pipe dream ray tracing) then your 2 year old rig might start to have some trouble.

Re:I PC game, and have zero reason to upgrade

[hairyfeet]

That is the dirty little secret both sides don't want to talk about and why guys like me have branched into home theater and networking setups as there really isn't any reason to upgrade if you aren't one of the 5% or so that push a system to the limit and even they are finding it harder to justify.

What neither chip maker wants to admit is that from 1993 to 2006 what we had was a BUBBLE, no different than the real estate or dotbomb bubbles. The MHz race meant that a 2 year old PC would be seriously struggling to run the latest software and a 3 year old PC probably wouldn't run half of the new programs. In one 4 year stretch I went from 300Mhz to 2200MHz, over 7 times the clockrate while having the memory and storage space just about double with each of the 4 systems between 300Mhz and 2200MHz. Since I too am a gamer during this period I was having to chunk my system almost yearly just because of how quickly the raw power was growing, it was insane.

Now compare to the system I have now....the system is nearly 5 years old, with a 4 year old hexacore and a GPU that has been out nearly 2 years....but why would I build a new one? Thanks to Turbocore my system has no problems playing the latest games, most of which only use a couple of cores, while the RAM is slower DDR2 I have 8 GB of it so games and videos are buttery smooth and with 3TB of HDD space and room for an SSD I'm certainly not hurting on the storage front. All I did was slap in a $100 HD7750 to replace my aging HD4850 (which frankly still played the newer games just fine, it was just a heat monster) and everything plays great, with more bling than I can pay attention to in the heat of battle.

And of course the gamers are the minority...what about the majority? Luckily I have just about the most perfect "Joe Average" test case any PC shop guy could ask for in my dad, his PC usage is about as ordinary and middle of the road as one can get. Webmail, video chat, watching movies, web surfing, you can't get more average when it comes to test cases. When the Phenom IIs dropped right before the Bulldozer release I thought "Ya know, its been awhile since I built him that $199 Phenom I quad special**, now that the prices have dropped maybe its time to upgrade his system" so I ran a log for a couple weeks on his home and office systems just to see how hard they were being slammed...the result? That Phenom I quad was maxing out at 35% and the Pentium Dual at work was maxing out at just 45%!

So there really isn't any reason to upgrade any longer, systems went from "good enough, but just barely" to "fire breathing funny cars that spend more time idling than working". This is also why I have no problem remaining an AMD exclusive shop, as it really doesn't matter if AMD releases on the smallest nm or even comes out with new chips as the ones they have is so overpowered it just isn't funny, and my customers just love how much power I can give them for very little $$$.

**- Man those that missed jumping on the Phenom I don't know what they missed, thanks to the TLB bug I was grabbing those chips for $30 a triple and $45 a quad and to this day they make great desktops, even have a customer that does 3D robotics design on a Phenom I X3 and it works great. The best "bang for the buck" deals right now for those that want a real steal? If you want an HTPC the socket AM1 quads are just nuts, you can grab the APU and the board for less than $100 and if you need an ULV server you can save $15 by swapping the Athlon quad for the Sempron. On the desktop front the Athlon X3s and Phenom X3 on AM3 are just highway robbery, with those chips easily found in the $45 range and paired with a cheap AAC board I'm seeing close to 80% unlocks on these. A 3GHz+ quad for less than $50? You just can't beat that. For the gamers many are recommending the Athlon 750K for FM2 but I'm bucking the trend and saying grab the FX6300 AM3 because you can grab an X6 with a turbo of 4.1 GHz for just $106 shipped. With the FX you are getting two chips in one, a really fast triple for your single threaded games and a hexacore for your multitasking...at $106? Its a steal.

Re:I PC game, and have zero reason to upgrade

[PRMan]

Just this weekend I realized that my motherboard's copyright date was 2009 (AMD Phenom X2 unlocked to 4 cores). It's 5 years old already (hard to believe) and I can play all the latest games on the top settings for the price of a $150 graphics card. I'm sure the 16GB RAM and the SSD help, but there is seemingly no reason to upgrade other than 4K, if you want to do that.

Re:I PC game, and have zero reason to upgrade

[Kargan]

How can I tolerate you?

(NOTE: This is a Tool reference, I'm not just being a random jerk).

Sigh.

[pushing-robot]

This GPU has nearly identical performance to the R9 280 that came before it

Which had nearly identical performance to the 7950 that came before it. Which came out nearly three years ago.

Meanwhile, this says it all about the CPU. Sure, the AMD might save you $100 over the (faster) Intel, but you'll pay that back on a beefier PSU and cooler and electricity bills to support the beast.

What happened, AMD? I loved you back in the Athlon64 era...

Tonga

[rossdee]

King Tupou VI wants royalties

Not really 8 cores...

[Junta]

If IBM did the processor, they would have called it 4 Core with SMT2. Basically you have 4 modules, with 2 of many of the components, but a lot of shared components. Notably, each of the 4 modules has a single FPU (so it's more like IBM's SMT8 versus SMT4 mode if you talk about their current stuff).

So it's more substantial than hyperthreading, but at the same time not reasonable to call each chunk a 'core'. I think it behaves better than Bulldozer did at launch *if* you have the right platform updates to make the underlying OS schedule workload correctly, but it's still not going to work well (and some workloads work better if you mask one 'core' per module entirely).

Basically, it's actually pretty analogous to NetBurst. NetBurst came along to deliver higher clock speeds since that was the focus of marketing, with some hope of significant workloads behaving a certain way to smooth over the compromises NetBurst made to get there. the workloads didn't evolve that way and NetBurst was a power hungry beast that gave AMD a huge opportunity. Now replace high clock speed with high core count and you basically have Bulldozer/Piledriver in a nutshell. I'm hoping AMD comes back with an architecture that challenges Intel agin, just like Intel came back from NetBurst.

Re:gaming rig

[Junta]

Why not actually try the games that you want and then decide if things are too slow at all, rather than listen to some people that will evangelize how cool new stuff is with impunity since it is not their money they are justifying spend on...

Also, my wife thinks a grown man playing computer games is a little bit pathetic, and I can't really argue with her,

What could be pathetic is neglecting responsibilities or pissing away family savings on superfluous stuff. If one takes care of their responsibilities appropriately and is prudent in their spending, it doesn't really matter if a grown man plays computer games or watch telly tubbies or whatever they like so long as it doesn't screw up other people's lives.