Anandtech article:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10907/amd-gives-more-zen-detai...
3.4+ GHz for 8-core base frequency (TDP is apparently 95W) is good news.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10907/amd-gives-more-zen-detai...
3.4+ GHz for 8-core base frequency (TDP is apparently 95W) is good news.
I'll be extremely surprised if it's faster than a 4-core core i5 skylake which runs at 65W TDP, in the $200 per cpu price range.
It's worth mentioning that the i7-6900K has a TDP of 140W [1]
I have to admit when I first saw 95W I wasn't impressed because I didn't realize how high the TDP of the 6900K was.
[1] https://ark.intel.com/products/94196/Intel-Core-i7-6900K-Pro...
I know, I was surprised too... I used to buy AMD, but haven't in some time now. Perhaps I will again...
I've been hearing that for the last eight years and it has never been proven to be true, in real world benchmarks and $$$/performance by the time equivalently priced tiers of competing varying $125, $195, $250 and $350 CPUs are available for purchase.
We don't know yet whether Zen is as good as Intel CPUs, but the statement "You're thinking the old AMD architecture, which was quite different from that of Intel, and it sucked. The new Zen architecture is much more similar to that of Intel." Is absolutely correct, and is something that was not correct about any AMD CPU released in the past 8 years.
I used to only buy AMD. Im not exactly sure where they are up to now (probably about 8 years if not more since I touched them)
but i definately remember the bulldozer hype and subsequent flop. lies about the number of cores and other things that just made me say "my computing is to important to my life to play that game".
I was also privy over the years to some test builds of machines including head to head amd vs intel. it is truly painful to say that not only were they often more expensive (new) for the performance, they were also horribly unreliable, pausing, and doing all sorts of stuff that made us sad.
hope thats changed, but saying there is any similarity between the current in use intel vs amd range is very far from the mark.
Are you kidding or did you mistype? Current AMD processors don't generally compare favorably to Intel with respect to some metrics, like absolute performance per core or performance per Watt. However if there is any metric where they match or surpass Intel, it's actually perf/$.
The reason is simple: perf/$ is the only metric where AMD has some control: they can decide to lower and lower their price down to wherever they need to be. If AMD wasn't competitive on at least perf/$ they would be in a much worse situation.
Here is one example I witnessed first hand recently when doing some video work: a good old $100 3.2 GHz 8-core Phenom matches or surpasses most ~$200 Intel processors when encoding MPEG2 files to H.264 with the Linux x264 encoder.
This is bullshit through and through.
Between $100 and $150, you get any of AMD's FX 6xxx and 8xxx line. We're talking about 6 and 8-core processors whose performance are, in the very least, comparable with some of Intel's i5 and i7 offerings.
And Intel's comparable offerings cost over twice what AMD's processors sel for.
The FX-8320E when overclocked can compete in multi-threaded computational workloads, but will use a lot more energy. For games (which is the main area where users stress their processor), the i3-6100 will still be faster. See http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1709?vs=1682. The bigger FX-8s are too expensive and would be pitted against i5s, where they always lose.
The only recent exception I ran across is Watch Dogs 2, which is sufficiently optimized for multiple cores and AMD processors to make the FX-8370 for once competitive against Intels i5. But that is the first game since the release of those processor where that is happening.
What does work for AMD is the Athlon X4 8.0K, the area under 100€. Intels Alternative is the Pentium G4.00, which is worse for most things.
If those results are accurate, they do seem to support that AMD FX CPUs are still competitive with new Intel CPUs in the same price range.
The FX has the potential to be a fast processor in specific workloads. Yes, that fits to what you said. Certainly not when single-threaded, but in multi-threaded workloads it can still be fast. But faster than the i5 it is only very rarely (which, yes, is less harsh on the FX than I was in the comment above). It is a pity that its potential (4 years ago it compared to a weaker i5) could not be used in meaningful ways in common software.
By now it is clearly not a good choice anymore: It uses more energy, depending on what you compare it with it is more expensive or costing the same, and it is on an old platform (AM3+) that won't see further updates.
> They're evenly matched on other tests (e.g. Handbrake & "Agisoft PhotoScan
No. We don't seem to have the same benchmarks. I'm looking at http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1709?vs=1646, where the i5 is clearly faster in the Agisoft and Handbrake benchmarks. It is mainly in the artificial multi-threaded benchmarks as well as Linux 7zip and Linux OpenSSL that the FX can win. For games the FX is almost always behind, but often close, however, those are partly limited by the gpu and thus not too meaningful.
> If those results are accurate, they do seem to support that AMD FX CPUs are still competitive with new Intel CPUs in the same price range.
No. They mean get an i5: Way better in single threaded workloads which is what counts for 90% of software, faster in realistic multi-threaded workloads. Get an FX if all you do is run OpenSSL and 7zip under Linux, or if already having a good AM3+ board (for that scenario it still is good enough).
There are 87 benchmarks there. I do not believe they re-do all 87 each time someone releases a processor. It's more likely that they are reusing old 8370 results and comparing with new 6600 results. I question whether all variables (OS, drivers, minor version numbers of software, etc.) are the same. (I'm not saying that re-doing the 8370 tests would favor AMD, just that it would give more accurate results). They don't mention what settings they used for the software, and what exactly each program is stressing. Splitting the PhotoScan results into five seems very arbitrary. Two decimal places in each result with no error bars, no indication of how they performed the measurement, no indication of the number of times they performed the test leads me to think that it's not a very well conducted set of tests.
> > They're evenly matched on other tests (e.g. Handbrake & "Agisoft PhotoScan
> No. We don't seem to have the same benchmarks.
We clearly have the same benchmarks. "evenly matched" was a poor choice of words, but I don't see a ~23% advantage for the 6600 to be very significant, when other results have the 8370/6600 100% faster than the 6600/8370.
> They mean get an i5: Way better in single threaded workloads which is what counts for 90% of software, faster in realistic multi-threaded workloads.
For browsing, office and most games the 8370 and 6600 are close enough that the average user won't notice a difference. Most users don't spend any time waiting for software that eats 100% of <= 4 cores, which is where the i5's advantage lies. What you find "realistic", I may not, and vice-versa. It depends on the user, and what he's using his computer for.
The i5 may well be the better choice for most users. It certainly has a number of advantages: less power-hungry, newer chipset/features, more upgrade options. My point is simply that the FX cpus are still price and performance competitive with new i5s. Which is better depends on the needs of the user.
Well, every gamer does, and this exactly describes what web-browsing does. However, the FX is of course not too slow for that. Just slower.
> It depends on the user, and what he's using his computer for.
Sure. I was joking above with "get The FX if all you do is 7-Zip on Linux", but yours is of course a correct statement. If you identified correctly that the FX will perform better for your workload, then it is a better choice (if okay with higher energy usage and not having further upgrades, which just might be the case, and it is not like intel is known for long socket support anyway). I for example use Funtoo, which is a Gentoo variant, meaning I compile stuff all the time. I'm on an older processor, but I assume the FX would be a good choice for me.
> It's more likely that they are reusing old 8370 results and comparing with new 6600 results.
I think exactly for the FX-8370 that might be not true, as it is the processor you'd have wanted to compare the new skylake-i5 against. But for the others and older models exactly that will happen. I see no big issue there.
> I don't see a ~23% advantage for the 6600 to be very significant, when other results have the 8370/6600 100% faster than the 6600/8370.
~23% advantage is very significant to me. That is way off of measurement errors. 100% difference just matters even more ;) Also, that it is most often pro-i5.
Ah, I just hope Zen will turn out as great as I hope and is announced and I can start recommending and defending those processors :)
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2011/10/12/amd-fx-8150...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/06/amd_sued_cores/
Note that they changed that with ZEN
http://wccftech.com/amd-one-fpu-per-core-design-zen-processo...
* http://www.leagle.com/decision/In%20FDCO%2020160408M22/DICKE....
/ ((cost) * (power))AMD has been teetering on the edge of bankruptcy for quite awhile now. It's unclear how much rope they have left.
They have actually dug themselves out of that hole over the past two years or so. Their engineers are good, but their CFO is a wizard. Somehow he managed to take a company with bad short-term prospects and very questionable long-term ones that was up to it's eyeballs in very expensive short term debt and convert that into cheap long-term debt. Then once things started going better for them and the stock started going up, they have been turning their debt into equity pretty much as soon as possible.
AMD currently is in no risk of bankruptcy:
http://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/AMD-CFO-C...
Intel Xeon E5-2665 ($80 on eBay) = 8 cores, 2.3-3.1GHz
Intel Xeon E5-2660 ($60-65 on eBay) = 8 cores, 2.2-3Ghz (so you can buy two for $120-130)
Intel Xeon E5-1650 ($97 on eBay) = 6 cores, 3.5-3.8GHz
E5-2665 beats FX-8350 hands down, and is cheaper.
I can buy a whole workstation with E5-2665, motherboard, 32GB RAM, 1TB HDD, all for $414, shipped.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/162274529994
I doubt you can find something like that with FX-8350 and cheaper. And it will still be slower.
Depends a lot on your electrical cost. Some people live in places where the power costs $0.05 per kWh. Some people live in places where it cost $0.36 per kWh (Hawaii).
If somebody wants a machine with a lot of xeon cores and a ton of ram (but noisy), you can buy a dell poweredge r910 server with 4 sockets x 8-core xeons and 128GB of RAM for like $1100. Makes an excellent xen or kvm hypervisor dom0/host development machine. It's just noisy, so in a home environment, put it in your garage or something on the far end of a cat5e cable.
I have a AMD FX 8320 workstation, and I assembled it brand new for less than €400.
In fact, if you take away the €130 referring to the price of an AMD FX 8320, you get the remaining budget for the mobo, RAM, and HDs.
My wife's laptop died, and she just wanted me to do put together something cheap for her office (she has a tablet and work laptop). I bought myself a new motherboard (keeping my CPU), gave her my old one and put in an older CPU I had.
A year and half later, I upgraded my CPU to an FX-8350. My old CPU (Phenom x4) moved to the basement NAS/Plex server, a nice upgrade to Athlon II CPU (without requiring a new motherboard).
Had I been on Intel, I would simply not done those upgrades because they wouldn't have been worthwhile. Basically every CPU upgrade requires a new motherboard. And in my experience, nearly every time I've had to get a new motherboard, my memory or video card or some other component is now outdated, and suddenly I'm basically building a completely new PC.
those don't exist
less performance than a $133 intel e5 2650
and neither are worth buying today.
currently, amd does terribly in pretty much every measure. absolute performance, performance per $, throughput. absolutely anything that matters.
There are some promoted intel chips that are worse.
but the only thing amd have been doing well at in recent years is hyperbole with a healthy dose of shilling. So i cant disagree with anyone on here that wont believe anything they say until they see it.
around this time last year we had
Gamers need perf/core. Datacenters need perf/power.
They're only viable for "cheap CPU" in the < $100 range which is low margin.