What I don't like about the FX-8350 is that my i7 from 2009 is just as fast.
I know AMD is no longer trying to be speed king, which for consumers sucks because the CPU I want is still >$500 from Intel
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BlackHawkBible music connoisseurThere's no place like 127.0.0.1Icrontian
I have to ask, what happened? This is the first time I've heard of this core (partly my fault) but I can remember back then when just the announcement thread of Barton would lead to a 50+ page thread with news and theories here on Icrontic.
Damn that is a those are some sweet graphs you might say.
I'd say that the previous release of the FX chips left a bad taste in people's mouths. They expected a price and performance winner, but intel beat them pretty badly with the release of the i[5/7]-2600k lines.
Enthusiasts weren't necessarily the target of the bulldozer line, so there wasn't much discussion of them around here (other than in terms of intel's offerings being better).
Enthusiasts weren't necessarily the target of the bulldozer line, so there wasn't much discussion of them around here (other than in terms of intel's offerings being better).
Not only that, but are enthusiasts really all that wrapped up in CPUs anymore? It seems the enthusiast market (at least the gaming enthusiast market anyway) has come to terms with fact that the newest, shiniest, fastest CPU doesn't make much difference anymore. The GPU is where real gains are made these days.
I'm going to agree with @ardichoke - The GPU is the real enthusiast part. It has been for awhile now. The CPU is less exciting than it used to be, the gains they offer are incremental. In the case of AMD, Bulldozer was an empty promise. I was even left jaded. I believed they were going to deliver the next big thing, and it feel flat in almost every way, I regret moving to it, my Phenom II X6 performed just as well, I could have saved $400+ on a platform upgrade that I did not need. While the FX-8350 is a move in the right direction, I'm still not sure I'm that compelled if I'm being 100% honest. I'd rather take that money and upgrade my graphics / monitors, or buy more SSD storage.
Hell, I'm still running a Phenom II X4 on an AM2+ motherboard in my desktop/gaming rig. Nothing I do on a day to day basis, and no games I play, peg that CPU (faster memory might be nice though). If I were to upgrade at this point, my GPU would still give me the biggest performance increase for my dollar.
I still use a 960T unlocked and overclocked. I have skipped the first FX8xxx series since they were the first iteration of a new architecture just like the first Phenom. The new 8320 looks extremely appealing but 960T is still very difficult to let go. Actually, the used price of a 960T is nearly the same on Ebay with the new 8320. The upgrade will be (almost) free, can you believe that? It is my reward for sticking with AMD; the 8320 will plug in the same socket of my AMD970 board with a simple BIOS update. I am thankful AMD is here for hardware enthusiasts on a budget like me and hoping their financials recover and they can keep making processors. I can't wait to overclock the 8320 and start building Android on it.
Don't get me wrong, Piledriver is a multi threaded monster for the price. It's all relative to where you are at in your current build. If I were building fresh, an 8350 would be a no brainier, but as an incremental upgrade it's not smart money for me. I wish I would have waited for this chip.
As someone who, hopefully this next year might actually be able to start chucking together some cash, this is pretty great news for me. Hopefully when I finally get around to building my first actual rig, this will make it a bit easier to do.
Maybe it's time I started giving AMD some consideration.
The FX 8350 does excel at certain multi threaded loads. It also is exciting that AMD has presented a great value to it's user base by making the hardware backwards compatible for three generations now.
That said, I think it's clear that traditional X86/X64 CPU's are becoming less and less relevant in the consumer desktop space. My position is that AMD's greatest asset is it's APU. It's the future of computing and they are doing it better than anybody else. They need to double down on that, find ways to innovate it so it fits into every available space, mobile, server, productivity desktop and enthusiast desktop. AMD needs to change how the game is played.
Trying to compete with Intel in the traditional CPU market is as waste of financial and human capital that could be better spent advancing AMD's more innovative and differentiated technology.
For all those people seeking upgrades: Black Friday. I got a $150 2500K last year at Microcenter (walked right past everyone who wanted TVs), and nobody has come close to that price since then.
CPU sales don't seem to be super common on Black Friday, but worth keeping a lookout for. Getting that CPU is the one and only time I've bothered to line up at a place on Black Friday, and it was oh so worth it.
Why building a system from scrap with fx-xxxx is no brainer? I feel the other. If I'm wrong pls correct me. I'm a casual gamer, using Internet browsing most of the time, some office apps, video editing etc,. But just think about the scenarios i give below. Let's assume that case 1. MP3 songs play always in the background, on parallel video editing, simultaneously browsing internet for some tutorials case 2. MP3+Video encoding+ games like (GTAIV or BF3 or Crysis 2 etc., probably muted or lesser volume as i'm hearing mp3 songs) case 3. Video encoding or decoding, HD video playback+internet browsing
These are the normal usage of PC users, may be Video editing or encoding may be replaced by some productivity apps, or programming compilers etc.,
In these scenarios, definitely the more cores, more faster. So I ll prefer FX4300 or A10 5800K against a i3- 2120 at any day. The same happens in high end too, a FX 83x0 against a i5-2500 or i5-35xx.
@inspirearun - I think you raise a valid point. The current crop of benchmarks don't tell the whole story. I want to know, how is this chip going to perform for me, for the things I do. For allot of us that means some level of multitasking, and the benchmarks are not necessarily tailored to represent this.
How would we simulate that kind of load? Measure it in a way that's serving the market better than the traditional benchmark methods?
So this is a bit late to the party, but I can say that for Case 1: My tablet will do MP3 songs + browsing internet at the same time. That implies that those two tasks are nearly too simple to stress anything. Similarly, showing HD video playback+internet browsing can also be done on a "modern" tablet (like an iPad2, Google Nexus 7, etc) without much fuss.
As for parallel video editing, that ultimately depends on the type of video editing you're doing. However, I've found that it's not all that demanding a chore (provided you're not doing some significant amounts of processing while editing the video - applying layers, etc), and works reasonably well on, say a Core2 based CPU.
Now, Case2 (Video Encoding) is what really eats up processing power, plus it has the added feature of being highly parallelizeable. In that case, more cores = better performance. In that case, I think that the AMD chip is actually better than the i5 chips that it's "competing" against. While single threaded performance of the i5 is better, the fact that you have double the number of threads you can run on the AMD chip more than makes up for it, in that scenario.
I don't know if that answers anyone's questions, but it sure answers my itch to post something!
primesuspect
Beepin n' BoopinDetroit, MI Icrontian
Comments
i5-3570k $229 newegg | $189 MicroCenter
Two things I like about Piledriver: 1: 8 cores 2: cheap. The FX-8320 is the real bargain here.
You can get a FX-8320 and Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD7 for $375 (or UD5 for $30 less)
Now you're still stuck on PCIE 2.0, but hey we wanted cheap right?
I know AMD is no longer trying to be speed king, which for consumers sucks because the CPU I want is still >$500 from Intel
I'd say that the previous release of the FX chips left a bad taste in people's mouths. They expected a price and performance winner, but intel beat them pretty badly with the release of the i[5/7]-2600k lines.
Enthusiasts weren't necessarily the target of the bulldozer line, so there wasn't much discussion of them around here (other than in terms of intel's offerings being better).
Maybe it's time I started giving AMD some consideration.
That said, I think it's clear that traditional X86/X64 CPU's are becoming less and less relevant in the consumer desktop space. My position is that AMD's greatest asset is it's APU. It's the future of computing and they are doing it better than anybody else. They need to double down on that, find ways to innovate it so it fits into every available space, mobile, server, productivity desktop and enthusiast desktop. AMD needs to change how the game is played.
Trying to compete with Intel in the traditional CPU market is as waste of financial and human capital that could be better spent advancing AMD's more innovative and differentiated technology.
CPU sales don't seem to be super common on Black Friday, but worth keeping a lookout for. Getting that CPU is the one and only time I've bothered to line up at a place on Black Friday, and it was oh so worth it.
I'm a casual gamer, using Internet browsing most of the time, some office apps, video editing etc,.
But just think about the scenarios i give below. Let's assume that
case 1. MP3 songs play always in the background, on parallel video editing, simultaneously browsing internet for some tutorials
case 2. MP3+Video encoding+ games like (GTAIV or BF3 or Crysis 2 etc., probably muted or lesser volume as i'm hearing mp3 songs)
case 3. Video encoding or decoding, HD video playback+internet browsing
These are the normal usage of PC users, may be Video editing or encoding may be replaced by some productivity apps, or programming compilers etc.,
In these scenarios, definitely the more cores, more faster. So I ll prefer FX4300 or A10 5800K against a i3- 2120 at any day. The same happens in high end too, a FX 83x0 against a i5-2500 or i5-35xx.
How would we simulate that kind of load? Measure it in a way that's serving the market better than the traditional benchmark methods?
As for parallel video editing, that ultimately depends on the type of video editing you're doing. However, I've found that it's not all that demanding a chore (provided you're not doing some significant amounts of processing while editing the video - applying layers, etc), and works reasonably well on, say a Core2 based CPU.
Now, Case2 (Video Encoding) is what really eats up processing power, plus it has the added feature of being highly parallelizeable. In that case, more cores = better performance. In that case, I think that the AMD chip is actually better than the i5 chips that it's "competing" against. While single threaded performance of the i5 is better, the fact that you have double the number of threads you can run on the AMD chip more than makes up for it, in that scenario.
I don't know if that answers anyone's questions, but it sure answers my itch to post something!