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.

How about idle??

[Anonymous Coward]

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 ;)

Lowers barrier to entry

[Gothmolly]

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.

Re:Lowers barrier to entry

[h4rr4r]

Get an SSD.
Local storage is a must for performance. iscsi cannot hold a candle to local SSDs. In a lab you won't need to share the storage with multiple machines anyway.

Phoronix is great but I want more

[coder111]

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

Re:Perfect for the 99%

[Billly Gates]

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 :-(

Re:Lowers barrier to entry

[Simulant]

I converted about 20 physical servers to hyper-v VMs running on two 2 socket/32 core Bulldozer, hyper-v hosts at the beginning of the year and have been thrilled with the results. Those two servers provide more horsepower than my company needs and, in a pinch, either one of them can run all of the critical VMs itself. Not a single problem since deployment. I paid around 11k/box. Intel cost quite a bit more in hardware as well as for the per socket licensing of Hyper-v for that many cores using intel chips. I was converting >4-5 year old hardware and as far as the users are concerned, everything is faster now.

I will keep buying AMD as long as they are cheaper and "good enough", if only to keep some competition alive.

Still running a quad-core AMD gaming machine at home as well and it is still playing every thing I throw at it.