News AMD launches Piledriver-powered FX processors

Only got our chip yesterday; we'll have a review up soon.

 

You can look at me all you like Adnoctum, it still doesn't change the fact that this release "yet again" is not a very good one. Just like last years disappointing Bulldozer release.

Let's wait for next years "insert tough name here" release with another 15% increase in performance but will cost you at least 4 times as much to run your "workstation" on your business rate energy tarrif.

Keep that myth going boys!

 

I hope you guys will compare it to both Zambezi and Thuban, stock and overclocked.

 

.... and not only gaming. Please use rendering, golding, etc. on your review.

 

.... and the overall cost of running such a system and temperatures on your review.

 

.... cluster of 36K opterons here .... Sparc got dumped and Xeon got disqualified .... better price / perf with opterons. AMDs consume more than Intels, but the platform overall cost is inferior.

Just look at TDP and clock speed of SB / IB Xeon .... look at the price .... then do the same with opteron (bulldozer based, waiting for piledriver ones). TDP are practically the same, but the cost is not the same (or the clock speed has been halved compared to the intel desktop cpu).

 

Where exactly? What's the better/price/ perf with opterons?

 

Let's not detract from the notion that this is supposed to be another "Gamer and PC enthusiast" component that appears to not be either.

"Gamers and PC enthusiasts who buy AMD FX processors have even more to cheer about with the increased speeds and value we are delivering starting today," said Leslie Sobon, vice president of Desktop and Component Products, AMD. "After introducing the industry's first and only eight-core desktop processor last year, we now have even faster stock frequencies and an all-new, high-performance x86 core architecture to satisfy power-users."

I'm sorry gents but this release lives up to neither a gamers or PC enthusiast product.

 

Supplied by AMD.?

Generous of them, after your 'It's a stinker' verdict on the Bulldozer...)

 

I'm sorry, but only ignorants will take marketing people words as real world facts. Your "so called gamers" are supposed to be a minimum informed and capable or reading tech reviews. And for the 100th time, COMPUTING IS NOT ONLY ABOUT GAMING !! If your sole interest in a computer is gaming .... then go buy a console. It'll cost you less and last longer.

 

No need to get upset. The quote was from the VP of Desktop and Component products.

This is neither a gamer or PC Enthusiast product. FACT!

 

Wouldn't agree with that, gamer isn't a technical term that you can quantify, so this will be completely useable for some gamers for instance.

 

Whilst i think the chip sucks, I wouldn't say it cant be a decent chip for gaming, combined with a mid to high end GPU, were only talking about the difference between 80fps with AMD or 100fps with Intel, so its a moot point as long as you get a solid 60fps, and 99% of the time when you dont, it's down to the GPU running out of steam, not the CPU these days.

If you need a CPU for running single core, IPC hogging things like emulators, then you wouldn't go near these CPU's...Intel all the way.

 

an i3-3220 would be more than enough for almost all gamer, but they all keep buy i7, that's a FACT ! People do not buy what they need, but only the biggest available. It's all about pride nowaday. Keep wasting you money is unecessary thing and feed the Intel banking account by buying their overpriced cpu ... I'll keep choosing the best I can have for my money that suites my need. For what I do (rendering and highly threaded crunching, with little gaming) AMDs offering is more consistent than Intel ones. I do not have 300+ € to throw into a CPU for a quad + HT crap.

EDIT : And keep in mind that the only unlocked IB i5 is 15% more expensive than the most expensive FX piledriver. May you like AMD cpu or not, at least to not say it's crap. Without them Intel could charge you as much as they want. The time where computer were a luxury product is not that far away.

EDIT² : And YES I am upset when people are throwing such narrow-minded and crappy comment on something they didn't even used. You can't have everything, it's like cars, the fastest one do not have the best acceleration or torque or lacks 2 back seats or is not available in pink or consumes too much, is too low, do not fit inside the garage, cost too much, etc etc etc .... people are never happy.

Those AMD chips are nice for what they are designed for : MULTI-THREADING. But they are more than capable for gaming purpose, since it's more GPU dependant than CPU. You'll have less fps, just look at reviews, but it will always be far more than enough.

 

And the VP of Desktop and Component Products is a great source of information because he doesn't have a vested interest right?

My point was it seems a pretty solid chip for the price for the majority of end users, I don't have enough experience in server rooms to make a decision there but I believe what GuilleAcoustic states.

Yes Intel chips are better all round, especially in the high end, but piledriver seems to address much of the issues with BD, and is a step in the right direction and provides decent bang/buck (look around at all the reviews up on the web, they all pretty much conclude on the same thing)....

The majority of people don't need the power that the latest i7 provides, and this is a cheaper solution, which from an end user perspective, when paired with a decent GPU they won't be able to notice the difference in real world gaming, as you're looking at 5-10 FPS difference max.

But yet again, another AMD story, more Snips trolling. Happens every time, never change Snips it amuses me no end.

 

I find it a little sad that in years gone by AMD was branding it's processors as 2800+ etc to show that despite being clocked slower, they were equivalent to faster Intel chips. Now it's the other way around. They actually have to boost things to ridiculous levels to even compete.

It's a sad state of affairs that there's no competitor for Intels stuff, especially bitter considering Intel stifled AMD and will continue to reap the benefits of this, probably, forever more.

I'm not stupid, I bought a i5-3570K as it was the best in that price range and I simply couldn't justify trying to support the underdog again..

 

I'm mildly pleased by this. It's a bigger performance jump than I'd expected, but much less than needed.

Seems they still didn't manage to fix the power-leakage issue when overclocking. At the moment; My FX 8120 can draw close to 400 watts all for its' own consumption if I push it all the way to 4.8Ghz, stable. That said; a 15% generalized jump in IPC would really make an impact in some scenarios with my machine. Renders can take ages and I still find that, even at such insane clocks, it'll run out of puff on single/lowly threaded tasks.

Despite that; Even at 4.5ghz, on Air cooling; It'll only just nudge 71 degrees. Well over AMD's rated thermal limit for overclocking, but for a 125W chip at the start; that's pretty damn impressive.

Oh: Bit: Smack the HyperTransport as high as it'll go when you Overclock. That really opens up more Memory Bandwidth, you have to get a little nutty with the voltages through the Northbridge to push it much beyond 2600mhz on the NB, but it does have a profound impact in tests that are generally memory limited.

 

I don't hate you or your trolling Snips, because you are just so terrible at it. The best trolls are informed trolls, because they always know just the weakest point to do their griefing, while most trolls are merely annoying with their personal abuse. You are ignorant so you aren't a good troll, and you aren't abusive so you aren't annoying.

To say that the Vishera release "isn't a very good one" is massively ignorant, if only because you don't state by what measure. If all you are interested is in gaming or single-threaded performance, then that is fine, FOR YOU Vishera isn't of much interest. Although, Vishera isn't a terrible gaming CPU, it just isn't as fast as Intel.
If you are interested in multi-threaded performance, then the matter is very different. Vishera performs almost as good, as good or better than the Intel equivalent (depending on the program), but it is cheaper, the platform is cheaper and as I said Piledriver is fully featured and unlocked from top to bottom.

Point me to a desktop Ivy Bridge solution with ECC support, without paying the Xeon/workstation premium? Does it support Hyper-Threading or not? Does it support VT-d or not? Does it support TXT or not? Does it support vPro or not?
Is it overclockable or not? So the CPU will OC, but will the chipset let you (that's "No" unless you have a Z77 board)? You have those legacy PCI cards at work, which chipset will give you PCI? Does it support SRT caching or not? Does it have more than two 6Gbit/s SATA ports?
You gotta love Intel's segmenting strategy, it makes your purchasing decision as clear as mud.

Power costs may be important in a home gaming/HTPC machine, it is less important in a workstation/server where the system is not being used for entertainment but to generate revenue.
Businesses care more about TCO of a system/platform than a single measurement. Power use is only one metric by which TCO is evaluated, and although the difference between Piledriver and Ivy Bridge looks big on a benchmarked graph, it wouldn't be significant when viewed alongside other costs associated with running servers.

You are disappointed with the 15% improvement from Bulldozer to Piledriver? That must make it a massive failure, right?
So where were you when Ivy Bridge outperformed Sandy Bridge by a massive 5%? And Intel did this with a die shrink from 32nm to 22nm.
AMD improved performance over Bulldozer while still being stuck on the 32nm SOI process and also keeping the same uncore. The 5-15% performance increase comes from core improvements alone, which is pretty good going. It may not beat Intel, but it isn't a failure.

As I said, Vishera is a server chip first and last, and that shows in the benchmarks. AMD has said that they can't compete with Intel on the high-end desktop, so they aren't going to devote precious engineering resources to a competition they have little hope of winning. Some people want AMD desktop chips like Vishera, so AMD is willing to sell them chips but they aren't going to go out of their way to develop a high-end desktop variant.
Where AMD is competitive is on low-power and mainstream platforms, graphics and in server applications. On the server side, AMD also cannot compete where Intel is strong, so the Bulldozer architecture is designed to gradually move to a place where AMD is strong: Parallelism. It is an architecture in transition.

Shock revelation/spoiler alert:

Spoiler

This move to Parallelism isn't going to make AMD any better at single-threaded performance

!

Spoiler

So if your only metric of CPU success/failure is in gaming/single-threaded benchmarks

, then you will never be happy with AMD for the near future. Given your history of shallow AMD trolling, I don't imagine that would ever have been a problem.

 

One thing that caught my eye in that Aandtech article is just how lazily they overclocked: Raw speed didn't help Bulldozer in the slightest when I was working on getting just about as much speed as possible out of the chip, I could achieve much better overall performance at 4.6ghz with a higher HT than I could at just forcing the chip all the way up to 4.9Ghz.

I'm hoping Bit-tech test this, I think it was touched on in the last review, but i've yet to see anyone really look at how it impacts performance.

I've been wondering if some of the issues with framerates are the extra processing, how much latency did Intel remove from their boards when they moved the NB into the CPU? Sure, your CPU is more complex, but it means everything is so much more tightly knit, AMD need to come up with something similar. As it is: It doesn't look like Vishera's Memory Controller had anywhere near the upgrade it needed, and the 990FX Northbridge still bottlenecks the memory to an extent.

Doesn't help that most motherboard manufacturers run the NB at 2200 mhz out of the box, where AMD states that "Up to" 2600mhz is within specification, that extra 400mhz and the extra 0.4GT/s that adds to the HT link can add almost 2GB/s to memory bandwidth. That's a hell of a difference for a few seconds twiddling settings in the BIOS.

 

Sigh the exact same comments once again. Why did I bother.