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Should i Set my Sights on AMD??

lettuce

lettuce

lettuce

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I have had the system in my sig for about 3.5 years now and only upgraded the GPU and added a SSD in that time, i was hoping that Haswell was going to be some godly CPU but from early reports it would appear its not going to be much of an improvement over Ivy :(. It hadnt even crossed my mind to consider AMD, as there is a lot of bad talk about the AMD and how they wont be around this time next year blah blah blah.

I have recently started to do a fair bit of video encoding aswell as playing games on my PC, i wasnt even aware that the AMD line actually had 6 or 8 actual hardware cores i thought they were like Intels Hyperthreading BS, but this is not the case, add in the fact that AMD's top chip the, Piledriver FX-8 8350 Black Edition, is stupidly cheap and has a high based clock speed compared to intel it would seem AMD is a good option.

So my question is, would i see much return for my new system build im planning in July time to go AMD, namely FX -8 8350 over my current i7 920 chip or stick with Intel in Ivy or Haswell??
 
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The only real upgrade to an i7 920 system right now would be a X79 system and a 3930K CPU. Any other upgrade path would be a slight upgrade in performance but not really worth effort / cost. Since 2500K / 2600K / Intel slammed on the brakes the mainstream chips and have been seemingly focusing their design to fit into the mobile 'Laptop' 'Notebook' 'Tablet' 'Phone' space.

The recent mainstream desktop chips are like an afterthought, barely any performance gain and more focus on integrated graphics and low power. No really worthwhile desktop performance features at all in the past two years..

At least with X79 you would gain extra cores, Quad channel memory and full PCI-E Bandwidth.

Otherwise hold out for AMD Steamroller, and see if it can offer something decent..
 
If you're into encoding the 8350 is a fab choice and great value at £162. The above posts saying it's not an upgrade over a 920 are totally wrong.

At stock speeds it's:
63% faster than your 920,
10% faster than a 3770K which costs £100 more
only 15% slower than the 3930K which costs £320 more
(x264 benchmark on anandtech).

I expect it to improve too as compilers are able to optimise for the architecture. Also AMD don't keep messing around with a new socket every year, meaning a good AM3+ mobo now could last a while.

On the other hand it does consume a lot more power and demands a half-decent mobo. Also, the Intel machines overclock further. As mentioned above it has poor single thread performance.

On a budget I'd go for it.
 
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Boomstick777 said:
I went from 2700K - 3770K - 3960X, the X79 system is much faster in everything.. There is no comparison in real world usage.. It fly's I tells thee.
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I doubt there is a big difference in performance between the 3960X and 3770k/2700k in games, sure, in photo and video editing etc. the 3960X will be quite a bit faster but I find it very hard to believe that there is a noticeable difference in gaming performance between them.
 
joeyjojo said:
If you're into encoding the 8350 is a fab choice and great value at £162. The above posts saying it's not an upgrade over a 920 are totally wrong.

At stock speeds it's:
63% faster than your 920,
10% faster than a 3770K which costs £100 more
only 15% slower than the 3930K which costs £320 more
(x264 benchmark on anandtech).

I expect it to improve too as compilers are able to optimise for the architecture. Also AMD don't keep messing around with a new socket every year, meaning a good AM3+ mobo now could last a while.

On the other hand it does consume a lot more power and demands a half-decent mobo. Also, the Intel machines overclock further. As mentioned above it has poor single thread performance.

On a budget I'd go for it.
Click to expand...

I find that hard to believe from all the reviews.
 
One issue is software optimisation, everyone is pro intel, uses intel compilers and essentially loses speed on AMD. The gap between AMD/Intel generally shrinks, sometimes dramatically on linux with both linux itself optimised and using programs recompiled with the best compiler for either cpu.

This should improve over time for AMD largely as the base architecture will get older and older. Another thing that is worth noting is Steamroller IS a huge upgrade over Piledriver, one of the key weaknesses in Bulldozer is the shared scheduler that can only decode 4 instructions per clock(Phenom could do 3, but for each core, so a hex core could decode 18 instructions, an Intel cpu can do 4 per core, so 16/24 for 4/6 core chips). Steamroller "fixes" this largely due to the increased transistor count available on 28nm, meaning 4 instructions per core, a huge reason that modules are slower when both cores are being used is the shared decoder, and the limit of 4 instructions per clock per core, this is effectively doubling for Steamroller.

This is a huge upgrade that in many situations will drastically improve performance, in others less(the core isn't always waiting to decode instructions nor always able to fill the decoder every clock, but when it is/can, you're talking about doubling throughput).

You've also got the console crossover, MS vis the new xbox, and basically all game dev's will be optimising all their software for AMD architecture, and as they'll be working closer with AMD they will be optimising for Steamroller as well, making sure they are using the optimal compilers and coding to effectively use 8 cores as well.

With Steamroller I would expect AMD will offer simply superior performance in the £200 and below market at any price point, a hex core Haswell will still be a chip designed by a huge R&D budget with 6 VERY fast cores in it, but I fully expect Steamroller octo's to give it a run for its money in several area's.
 
joeyjojo said:
If you're into encoding the 8350 is a fab choice and great value at £162. The above posts saying it's not an upgrade over a 920 are totally wrong.

At stock speeds it's:
63% faster than your 920,
10% faster than a 3770K which costs £100 more
only 15% slower than the 3930K which costs £320 more
(x264 benchmark on anandtech).

I expect it to improve too as compilers are able to optimise for the architecture. Also AMD don't keep messing around with a new socket every year, meaning a good AM3+ mobo now could last a while.

On the other hand it does consume a lot more power and demands a half-decent mobo. Also, the Intel machines overclock further. As mentioned above it has poor single thread performance.

On a budget I'd go for it.
Click to expand...

That is a cherry picked single result- look at the results of the other benchmarks on that Anandtech comparison and you will see that the 3770k is definitely the superior CPU. Now as for price/performance, the 8350 is probably better for heavily multithreaded tasks, but in terms of sheer performance overall, the 3770k is undoubtedly faster. As for single threaded performance, the 8350 is probably little better (if at all) than a 920.
 
AMD versus 3770K?
Why not consider the 8350 for what it is? A £155 retail CPU and compare it with Intel CPU's in the same price bracket, that way you get a realistic idea of what your money is getting in benchmark differences.

From what people are claiming, the £30 cheaper 8320 overclocks to the same levels as it's bigger brother.
Even the 990FX motherboards are cheaper than the Z77 variants.
So for the price of an Intel CPU you can have a reasonable AMD 990FX motherboard, 8 core CPU, 8gb Ram kit.
 
V F said:
I find that hard to believe from all the reviews.
Click to expand...

Nuclear Fusion said:
That is a cherry picked single result- look at the results of the other benchmarks on that Anandtech comparison and you will see that the 3770k is definitely the superior CPU. Now as for price/performance, the 8350 is probably better for heavily multithreaded tasks, but in terms of sheer performance overall, the 3770k is undoubtedly faster. As for single threaded performance, the 8350 is probably little better (if at all) than a 920.
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As the OP mentioned video encoding the most relevant benchmark is x264 pass 2, the most widely used video encoder today, and in FPS the 8350 is 10% faster than the 3770K at stock speeds. Not exactly controversial. That's using a real world video sample too not even the bechmark.

If you look at anandtech most of the benchmarks are synthetic and don't count for much.
 
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joeyjojo said:
As the OP mentioned video encoding the most relevant benchmark is x264 pass 2, the most widely used video encoder today, and in FPS the 8350 is 10% faster than the 3770K at stock speeds. Not exactly controversial. That's using a real world video sample too not even the bechmark.

If you look at anandtech most of the benchmarks are synthetic and don't count for much.
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Compare CPU performance at "stock speed" and completely ignore the overclocking potential/max clock, and completely disregard the fact that the FX-8350 is higher on stock at 4.0GHz comparing to i7 3770K's 3.5GHz is ridiculous. That's like like me saying "my i5 2500K is faster than the i5 4570K", and skip mentioning what frequency the CPUs are running at.

Considering both CPU pretty much hit around the same max clock, you should go have a look at comparisons with both CPUs at similar clock before saying the FX-8350 is 10% faster.
 
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Considering the OP uses an i7-920, surely Piledriver would just be more of a sidegrade? I would say wait for next gen CPUs.
 
at end of day depends what you do in your every day use

some say in game not much difference but if the game you use is cpu dependent even a 3570k can have a very big difference over a i7 920

just depends what you do.

if you just do odd bit of encoding and odd game then no real point.
 
Marine-RX179 said:
Compare CPU performance at "stock speed" and completely ignore the overclocking potential/max clock, and completely disregard the fact that the FX-8350 is higher on stock at 4.0GHz comparing to i7 3770K's 3.5GHz is ridiculous. That's like like me saying "my i5 2500K is faster than the i5 4570K", and skip mentioning what frequency the CPUs are running at.

Considering both CPU pretty much hit around the same max clock, you should go have a look at comparisons with both CPUs at similar clock before saying the FX-8350 is 10% faster.
Click to expand...

Don't get angry, it's a good point to mention. I was very careful to write "at stock speeds" several time in my post.

The only good data we've got is at stock, so until someone tests x264 on these two systems with identical settings and files they're the best numbers to quote.

We can make an approximation and say x264 FPS goes linearly with clock speed, then obvs a 3770K needs a 10% overclock (to 3.85 GHZ) to match a stock 8350K.

Or, if as you say they both get to say 4.3 GHz, we'd expect the 8350 to be 6% slower than the 3770K (in x264), which may be worth saving £100 over.
 
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