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Comment by tracker1 | Hacker News Reader

I just have to say, I really hope that this is real. AMD has burned a lot of trust a few times in overzealously stating performance marks in their prior generations of CPUs. I ran AMD for several years until the Core-2 came out from Intel (currently very happy with an i7-4790K).

If these comparisons are real, my next build may be AMD again.

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Seems like you skipped over the FX series (Bulldozer, I believe). I got a FX-8320 a few years back, and my brother got a FX-6300. Both are capable processors and are MUCH cheaper than their counterparts (i5 and i3, respectively).

Heck, if I built a PC in the past year, I would have gone with a FX-8350 just because it's so damned cheap yet very performant. Once Zen is out, it's really a no-brainer for me.

The biggest problem with the FX series, IMO, was the deceptive marketing. The FX-8000 CPUs were marketed as being 8-core, when in reality every pair of cores shared an FPU and cache, so real-world performance was much closer to that of a quad-core for many workloads. Add on top of that the abysmal IPC (compared to Intel's offerings) and high power consumption, and there was very little reason to get an FX-8350 or similar over an i5.

(Yes, today the FX CPUs are much cheaper, but when they came out they were barely so. I know because I got an FX-8350 as soon as it came out and regretted it.)

I have to disagree with that. Most workloads (H.264 decoding/encoding, gaming, typical desktop software, etc) are ALU-bound not FPU-bound. So the FX series is generally beating Intel on the perf/$ metric, just because it is so darn inexpensive. In my experience a $100 FX CPU is as good as a $200 Intel CPU when doing H.264 encoding:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13172972

(However the FX series perf/watt is worse than Intel, I give you that.)

Video encoding/decoding is definitely a niche for which the FX series had great value when it came out, so I agree with you on that. However, for gaming and most "typical desktop software", having higher single-core performance is much more important than having more cores, and the FX series was a huge letdown there. Then you factor in the extra energy you're using, and all of a sudden there are very few cases in which it makes sense to buy an AMD CPU over an Intel one.

(They're much cheaper now, so it might make a lot more sense to buy one today, but I'm sticking with my Intel CPU until AMD can prove themselves.)

Yeah, I would understand going for an i5 if the price difference was insignificant.

I had a home server that used an FX-8350, but it used a LOT of power... and the performance wasn't that great, I mean for the price sure, but in less than the cpu lifetime, you've already paid more for the extra electricity than a higher end i7.

I really like my FX-8320E but it's definitely not a speed demon. It struggles in single-threaded performance, in such tasks as web browsing... Even running vanilla Debian 8, browsing Reddit in Firefox is a bad experience. Images load very slowly (I have a 200mbps connection) and seem to make the rest of the processing hang. It's good for compilation though, and I can play recent games with it and an R9 280x.

Unless I'm sorely mistaken, Intel's single-core performance was ways ahead of Bulldozer chips.

True, but the price is a huge differentiator. The primary market for processors is gaming where the bottleneck is generally your GPU and memory. As a software developer, the difference between the two is not noticeable IMO.

I'd argue otherwise for software developers, especially if you're working with a large C++/Java codebase, or compiling large projects such as WebKit/Linux kernel.

To me the delta in price hardly mattered when I looked for how long I kept these systems running.

It matters a lot when you are on a very tight budget. I can either get a Kaby Lake i3 for $119.99, or a FX-8320 for $129.99. It's really a no-brainer.

Another way to look at it: instead of putting an extra ~$100 on an i5, which has performance most people don't really take advantage of anyways, you could get a better graphics card.

True and only you can make the choice on how to balance your system for your workload.

I'm still running an FX-6300 and it can't be beat, the thing only cost me $100. It does everything I need it to. I could imagine myself going for a ~$300 AMD chip.

They're ahead in multi-threaded performance, but as another commenter said, they suffer when it comes to single-threaded tasks, which meant that their gaming performance often suffered (my friend ran into this problem firsthand when he discovered that his FX6300 was bottlenecking his GTX 970).

Hopefully that isn't true anymore, or Intel may still be the superior chip for gaming.

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