News AMD launches Piledriver-powered FX processors

People arguing over silly things lol

But the real thing that will show if this is a success or not is sales, AMD needs a good quater or its stock price could see a 1 dollar a share which would not be good.

For everyones sake AMD needs to be at least semi competitive with Intel, It will never hold the out and out performance crown ever again anyone expecting as much is in LALA land.

Intels true high end the 6 core series of cpus has never been matched by a single AMD product for there purposes ( High end video work, CAD work to name 2 things ) AMD admited themselves they are not competing for this market no more.

This is a good CPU with poor power usage and some people will pay the £20-£30 for better power usage on a chip that will last you 3-4 years minimum. Unless your on the bleeding edge of required performance in which case you wouldnt be buying amd in the first place, CPU performance comes down to 2-3 things.

Power usage + Thermals
overclocking ability
Single threaded performance ( Where 80% of most peoples needs are )
Basic video and photo editing work
Gaming.

CPU hits 3 of the 5 above thats not bad at all in my book.

 

Does it finally better an X6 in gaming etc. guess that's the only thing most upgraders will care about, if you already have a decent system.

 

Their focus certainly appears to be the server market, with spin-offs offered to consumers.

The sad thing is, it's taken AMD four years to produce a CPU that comprehensively beats an i7 920. Just going by Geekbench, their IMCs seem particularly weak, and not just on CPUs; their GPUs need more memory and massive bandwidth to compete with nvidia's offerings - although, to be fair, they compete very well.

I think we may have to wait for their next 'entirely new' architecture before we have any hope of real competition.

Before anyone starts, I'm not trolling/baiting. I just think AMD have a long way to go before the enthusiast will consider their flagship CPUs as viable alternatives to Intel's.

 

Hear hear. As the absolute only person on here with an FX processor (At least; As far as I know.) I can safely vouch for the fact that it, at least, needs to get off the 990FX chip. The hideous bottleneck caused by the NB doesn't help matters.

Really what's needed, at bare minimum, is a wholly new Memory Controller design inside of the chip. The current one is a bodged up DDR3 version of the Phenom II DDR3/2 controller, which is, in and of itself, just a sped up version of the Athlon64's original design. Those two changes, coupled with a few improvements besides, would dramatically improve memory throughput, at least. Which is an area where AMD severely lags behind Intel, regardless of their best efforts.

Everything benefits from more bandwidth, as it would help keep the cores Saturated, rather than waiting for information to arrive.

 

if BT will oc the chips , can you also oc the board settings as well? by stock settings they are quite slack and slow - just tweaking settings get an increase at stock!

 

At 4.8 GHz, Anand's 8350 drew 300W (with mobo and everything). If your Bulldozer at the same frequency draws 400W, then I would say that that's a pretty significant improvement.

 

Keep in mind for the Intel part, that 77w TDP INCLUDES the HD4000 graphics. If you aren't running the iGPU and are running a discrete GPU, the actual TDP of just the x86 and uncore parts with the GPU left out is more in the realm of 45-50w on the 3570k (the HD4000 can consume up around 20W). I'd bet that the FX-8350 is actually pulling down close to its rated TDP of 125w...so actual CPU power dissipation performance the Intel part likely has a 2:1 lead (the i7 3670k pulls more like 55w or so, plus GPU gets it right up on the 77w TDP rating limit, the 3670k pulls roughly 10w more from the wall at full load than the 3570k because of the slightly higher clock and hyperthreading).

Performance wise, I bet it is a repeat of the Bulldozer versus Sandybridge scenario. Single threaded and low threaded results are going to heavily favor Intel Ivy Bridge chips. Highly threaded, FP heavy workloads the Intel stuff is probably going to edge out the Piledriver parts by a modest about and only heavily threaded integer heavy works loads will result in a Piledriver win.

All at the cost of siginificantly more heat and power draw.

 

also keep in mind that Vishera doesn't have an IGP and that they tested the power consumption with an GTX680 (adding 100W to the system wattage, even @ iddle or desktop display). A radeon HD7000 would have been a better choice with the zero core technology.

 

So due to the fact that I don't agree with your AMD dryleghumping it's called trolling is it? Nice one, I'll remember that. So when Bit-tech's figures come in with it being an excellent Gaming and PC Enthusiast product, I'll happily take it on the chin.

Finding an excuse to where this product actually sits has become quite the usual thing. It's not accomplished at what it's been designed and marketed to do but we'll take it anyway and find a use for it elsewhere.

Good luck with that while the companies share price is the lowest it has ever been and in no sign of recovering. Come on Nvidia, make your move now.

 

Just because it's not top of the line doesn't mean it wouldn't make a good gaming cpu?

 

i want a quad where 1st two cores run @ 50% faster than 2nd two.

2 x 5ghz + 2 x 3.3 > 4 x 4.2

 

Do not rush it but do not take too long

 

But could you build a better one without using it? I'll wait for Bit-tech to tell us

 

actually this thing has been stacking up quite well with the i5 even now. better frame rates on some of the dx11 games it was tested on, and faster in a few other areas as well. overall the i5 still has the edge, but with a 40$ difference, and with the gap not being anywhere near as far.... its actually worth buying now.

 

ive seen 3 games tested with both using the same hardware. the steamroller lost on skyrim(dx9), but actually outperformed the i5 on the 2 dx11 games... both chips at stock speed... my guess is that every one of anandtechs games were run at dx9 instead of 11, or something else was faulty in the amd build. i find it suspicious that the results ended up so different from http://hitechlegion.com/reviews/processors/31312-amd-fx8350, but only in the gaming department...

its a possibility that the steamroller architecture plays nice with radeon products then it does nvidia... but that possibility needs to be addressed in any testing done.

and btw number b is increasing by 15%, number a by 5%.... why wouldnt number b catch up??? pls revisit basic math.

 

Wow, obviously a lot of feeling on this topic.

I think the problem is that all of us are disappointed that AMD is effectively out of the race for high end enthusiast CPUs.

Every new release we cross our fingers and hope for the best, but we know in our hearts it is not going to happen.

Some of us take our disappointment and look for nice things to say about the chips, other channel that disappointment in to disparagement.

Ultimately we all want the same thing... true competition in the CPU market to push the envelope of innovation and price.

You can talk about bang for buck, bang for power and whether the chip is "good enough" or good for certain things. But come on, honestly, who here would seriously put this in their next main rig?

 

i would consider it... i dont have the cash for a 1k processor, and the standard i7 series doesnt offer much to any increase in gaming specs in comparison to the i5. so for gaming, amd is a pliable option for the mid-high area... its now a viable option for gaming... i think.

unfortunately it's a bit of a grey area because all the tests show weird results... i want a full range of tests done with both nvidia and radeon on REAL gaming performance. benchmarks often show performance differences that dont carry over... anyway as far as i can tell it will play games around the same level as the i5 at resolutions other than 1050p. so i would definitely put it with a pair of 7970s if so.

 

I'm still hoping for a miracle from AMD and that they pull something amazing out in 2013 or 2014. They are still getting killed in single thread performance and power consumption.

Moving down to 28nm or 22nm will help a little with the power consumption, but nowhere near enough. Maybe steamroller will get a die shrink and we can get an 8-core chip with a TDP under 100W. Optimistic I know but I can dream.

At least the new Piledriver CPUs are more competitive and make a hand decent upgrade if you are already on the AMD platform.

Maybe AMD can start a kickstarter... "Help us compete with Intel, you know you want to!"

 

Prob close to 0 jimmy and thats AMDs problem, Most people dont need an upgrade, Im still rocking an i7 950 ( in gaming rig ) and still see no reason to upgrade that gaming rig, Just replace gpus every year and your sorted till more games require more cpu power then the need to upgrade has died for many. most games still dont even use more than 2 cores.

And if true performance is your priority for work you get what goes fastest ignoring cost, intels 6 core cpus are just so fast they are insane in multithreaded applications. In the end of the day if you can encode something 4 times faster than the nearest chip using an 3960k then your going to buy that if your business is dependent on it.

AMD need to get the likes of Dell Lenova HP buying there cpus again and building systems making them thats how they will get out of there mess.

At the true high end AMD Will never compete again so expect intels prices to still be priced highly as they have no reason to drop the prices. Thats painful to write i tell you.

They have made some nice chips will anyone in tech land buy one i have my douts, any £100 cpu is good enough for gamers in the geek land, If gaming is not your priority then you likely already own a high end intel chip for your video photo work, Anyone here thinking of selling there ivy bridge, sandy bridge cpus for these chips by AMD i have my douts.