Orangey said:

People have been saying this every year and Intel will never do it.

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What not even in 2025

AllBodies said:

You're both reading too literally into my point.

The simple situation is it's a 4-pair design, rather than 8 'standalone', resulting in 8 weak cores with high clockspeed and very good parallelism. And cannot be compared to 8 Intel cores in terms of performance equivalence.

That's all I was saying.

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You can call them eight cores that are weaker than eight Intel cores, sure. Just that it's still an eight-core CPU. I thought you were hearkening back to when they were released and people tried to make out they weren't "real" cores because the person had never heard of a CPU without an integrated FPU.

Sure, a current eight-core Intel will beat out an FX-8350, but then to get eight Intel cores you have to look at chips like an i7-5960X which is over £900 to the FX-8350's £140. And depending on what you're doing (e.g. games) isn't going to make much difference.

EDIT: If we're getting into this, we should consider hyperthreading. If I were to use your own terminology but in reverse, I guess you cqn consider Intel's cores to be maybe 1.5 "cores", depending on workload. Assuming hyperthreading is turned on.

So what software these days actually utilises FPUs more heavily than integer calculations?

DragonQ said:

So what software these days actually utilises FPUs more heavily than integer calculations?

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As a general rule, stuff that has to deal with the "real world" to a high degree of precision. E.g. weather modelling. Also experimental mathematics (or what I like to call "giving up and throwing numbers at the wall until something sticks"). Some sorts of graphics rendering, I think. It's not that it's useless or not needed - far from it. I don't want to oversell this as redundant. It's just that you don't need it for running an OS, editing documents or playing nearly any common game. I.e. a lot of most people's work only needs a small amount of FP calculation easily handleable by a single shared FPU between two cores.

AllBodies said:

You're both reading too literally into my point.

The simple situation is it's a 4-pair design, rather than 8 'standalone', resulting in 8 weak cores with high clockspeed and very good parallelism. And cannot be compared to 8 Intel cores in terms of performance equivalence.

That's all I was saying.

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I don't think anyone is under any illusion that 8 Broadwell-e cores will offer more performance than 8 Bulldozer cores. If you pay 10x the price then you get more performance, who would have thought

I've been very tempted to go with an FX8 a few times, because AMD are just so far ahead of Intel on performance per pound.