AMD FX-8350 Review: Does Piledriver Fix Bulldozer's Flaws? 259
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.
Re:How about idle?? (Score:5, Informative)
Idle power seems pretty competitive with Intel's Core offerings. Anand found little difference and attributed it to their selection of a power-hungry motherboard.
Here's the problem... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:How about idle?? (Score:3, Informative)
So true. AMD isn't competitive energetically in any way anymore, but the desktop is probably the only place while it doesn't matter. When you're thinking mobile, saving energy is a priority. On huge server farms, little relative gains can mean a tangible different in absolute numbers. But on desktops, their difference is about a light bulb, at load, and hardly anything when idle. And with PSUs under 350W being incresingly harder to find and an FX-8350-based system only gobbling about 200W at its most intensive, it's probably "low enough" power consumption for most people.
tl;dr version (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Nice CPU, high power usage (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:Lowers barrier to entry (Score:5, Informative)
Same here. I built a Bulldozer machine for compiling projects in VMs last year and it works very nicely. If Intel had had a CPU with ECC memory and hardware virtualization support at a reasonable price I would probably have bought it, but I would have needed at least a $500 Xeon for that, with a more expensive motherboard, and I wouldn't be able to overclock it. For the same performance I have now I would probably have needed a $1k CPU.
Re:How about idle?? (Score:5, Informative)
I think the biggest factor for your home desktop is noise - it takes a lot more airflow to remove 125W of heat than 77W of heat.
Larger fans with slower rotational speed.
SATSQ (Score:5, Informative)
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.)
Re:Lowers barrier to entry (Score:2, Informative)
This is hyperbole. If what you're doing is mostly CPU or Memory intensive and requires very little disk activity having fast local storage isn't going to help much, if at all.
Besides, apparently it isn't a must for the grandparent as he stated he doesn't "need massive performance for a test lab."
Don't get me wrong, using an SSD to provide storage for a handful of VMs is a great idea (massive read/write IOPs), but it isn't necessary.
Re:Here's the problem... (Score:5, Informative)
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