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Comment by TwoNineA | Hacker News Reader

Good is competition. Began the Core Wars have.

Finally the regular i7 has moved beyond four cores. It only took ten years.

AMD had an octocore that still crushes most of intels stuff and it's been out for 8 years now.

Except it didn't crush most of Intel's stuff. It had more physical cores but lost in actual performance. That's why Ryzen was such a big deal, it's the first time AMD has been able to compete with Intel since the Athlon days.

Well, my modest FX8350E keeps working very fine.

Bulldozer and Piledriver worked fine, but never came close to "crushing" Intel's offerings. They were a decent option for specific workloads that only cared about parallel performance on a budget. If you cared at all about single threaded performance or had a few extra bucks, it was/is worth it to buy a comparable Intel offering for the entire lifecycle of Bulldozer and Piledriver.

"Working" is still a long shot from "crushing" however

They ran hot and angry. That's what makes Ryzen so surprising. It's fast and low power.

Check out cpu benchmarks on the fx line and get back to me. AMDs 300 dollar chip destroyed Intel's 1200 dollar server chip at the time. Hell that chip is still competitive to Intels latest and greatest

The FX series has high core counts but much lower single thread performance vs. Intel chips. For example, the FX-8350 has a respectable passmark score of 8949 which puts it in the ballpark of an i7 3770, which came out 3 quarters earlier, but its single thread passmark rating of 1509 is significantly less than 2069 for the i7 3770. The FX-8350 initially cost around $200 and the i7 3770 cost around $350. So the FX wasn't ever really competitive with Intel and certainly never crushed an Intel server chips.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+FX-8350+Eight-C... https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-3770+...

Don't forget the i7-3770 has half the TDP of the FX-8350 despite the overwhelmingly superior real-world performance in every meaningful metric.

I'm not sure in what world anyone could think the FX series ever "dominated" Intel chips at the time, much less current ones, in the datacenter -- unless they are literally delusional.

IIRC there were i7 chips with six or eight cores available for a while, they were just ridiculously expensive.

The X series has always been ahead of the curve, but priced astronomically expensive, usually well above the equivalent Xeon part.

The i7 was introduced as a 4-core part and only now have they started to shift that to 6-core by default.

If their initial trend with Core continued we'd be at 16+ by now.

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