The 8 core showdown and analysis thread.

[Martini1991]

It makes a huge difference in purely integer based or floating point based workloads.

http://www.hardcoreware.net/amd-piledriver-fx-review-vishera-8350/2/

Floating point Piledriver looks like an quad core (close to Intel i5) because of the shared FPU, but integer it looks like an ~ 7 core (compared to the i5), not too far from the theoretical speedup of 2x.

This doesn't translate to real-world applications very often though.

That's down to how the module is comprised.
Simply saying it's 4 module means sweet nothing, the application doesn't care about the semantics, the modules can't act as a single core each.

It's an 8 core, applications see it as 8 core. The semantics matter very little.

The performance is the way it is because of how the module is comprised (Again, not saying anything to the contrary).

Put it this way, had a module had 2 FP's in it, what would be the excuse then? AMD put across that their module was better than Intels Core+HT approach, and well it wasn't. AMD's approach is far far far closer to 8 cores than an i7 4770K or so ever is, yet it's still coming up trumps. (Ignoring the price difference for now, or the fact that an i7 and FX83 aren't directly competing since Bulldozer flopped against the i7 2600K which it did compete against).

 

[SlugForAButt]

So a 2Ghz Intel 8 core can compete with a 4.9ghz AMD 8 core...

So the new Intel 8 cores based on Haswell -E that are unlocked, will smash AMD's 8 cores back doors in. That's good to know, guess they will be worth the price tag then, awesome.

Yes, it will beat up AMDs current crop as long as you want to pay stupid money for it. The current Intel i7s beat AMD already but I'd go for the AMD every day unless I wanted to bench. The £/performance in gaming is in AMDs favour I reckon, and with the current gen of consoles being AMD based I reckon an 8 core AMD with a good GPU will be a good bet for the next few years.
So gratz to Intel on drip feeding us with irrelevant tiny increments in CPU power regularly at silly money, but I think AMD getting their back doors smashed in in raw CPU power is irrelevant when Intel wont compete on price.

 

[413x]

What I always want to see in benchmarks is

Single thread no OC
Single thread achievable OC
Single thread max OC

And same for full threaded bench

You almost never get a fair bench on the same system

 

[Sylver123]

Yes, it will beat up AMDs current crop as long as you want to pay stupid money for it. The current Intel i7s beat AMD already but I'd go for the AMD every day unless I wanted to bench. The £/performance in gaming is in AMDs favour I reckon, and with the current gen of consoles being AMD based I reckon an 8 core AMD with a good GPU will be a good bet for the next few years.
So gratz to Intel on drip feeding us with irrelevant tiny increments in CPU power regularly at silly money, but I think AMD getting their back doors smashed in in raw CPU power is irrelevant when Intel wont compete on price.

Intel won't compete on price because they have no need to considering there is no competition at all from AMD in
the high end desktop market so they can charge whatever they like for their high end desktop processors.

If it where the other way around, AMD would be doing the exact same thing as Intel.

 

[McstylisT]

Intel won't compete on price because they have no need to considering there is no competition at all from AMD in
the high end desktop market so they can charge whatever they like for their high end desktop processors.

If it where the other way around, AMD would be doing the exact same thing as Intel.

Exactly. Lets not put AMD up to be any different here. They are different and price accordingly as the HAVE to be. Its the only way they can obtain any market. If in some make believe world they did make a CPU that could compete then it would be shocker of a price for sure.

Do you guys make these assumptions up in your head ?

Bearing in mind current price of a FX9590 ?
I can also remember paying £270 for a X2 6000+ on release. Great processor at the time. Cant be said for today.

 

[james.miller]

I can also remember paying £270 for a X2 6000+ on release. Great processor at the time. Cant be said for today.

Was it? i recall the e6600 slapping it silly with half the tdp.

 

[McstylisT]

Was it? i recall the e6600 slapping it silly with half the tdp.

In most cases yes the E6600 was superior due to the higher IPC. think the E6600 was 95w ? this was the original 130w

I bought it as I wanted a higher feq rig as i was into ripping my DVD's back then. TBH i achieved some really impressive encode times , some even the E6600 mob struggled with. So it was a good CPU - but they charged £270

 

[james.miller]

e6600 was 65w tdp, the x2 6000 was the last of the 90nm windsor cores with 125w tdp. e6600 was quicker in just about everything and was, at least when anand did their review of the x2 6000+, $150 cheaper, and they overclocked much better as well.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2177

the x2 6000+ in reality was a hot, power hungry, more expensive cpu that just competed with intels of the time and not much more. It was fast for the time of course, but there weren't many reasons to buy one!

 

[ALXAndy]

Exactly. Lets not put AMD up to be any different here. They are different and price accordingly as the HAVE to be. Its the only way they can obtain any market. If in some make believe world they did make a CPU that could compete then it would be shocker of a price for sure.

Only it's not true because the Athlon XP absolutely battered anything Intel could muster up yet AMD kept the costs down. So sadly they've already been given the chance yet still didn't extract the urine.

Then let's look at their graphics cards. Radeon 295X2 is £1044.99

Titan Z is £1999, the 295x2 is faster.

So AMD have had plenty of chances to go mad with prices but have failed to do so.

So I'm not having that. That's just more excuses from camp blue to justify the massive price premiums they charge for their products. And they've always been like that, given the chance or not. Even the P4s that were massively underpowered were still stupid prices.

Some people will just pay anything to go to the blue team, even if they're slower.

Edit. AMD will never be deemed good enough to charge those sorts of prices. They did in the past, they ended up losing money. People see AMD as a dirty brand and thus, even when their products are better people just won't pay the high prices. Only Intel and Nvidia get away with that, and they do it by brainwashing and spending millions on salesmen to go around making their products sound like the sun shines out of their ass.

Even in this day and age, where people have the internet at their disposal and full and complete means to use an AMD CPU and see what it actually does there are still a million blue mound hounds running around completely misinformed. And this is down to Intel's marketing strategy and how they court people.

 

[humbug]

Nice work ALXAndy.

Would you mind running x264 bench? I'd like to see how they compare to my 4790K.

4790K @ 4.6GHz

FX-8350 @ 4.5Ghz

26.4 FPS, You're 15% faster at 4.6Ghz.

 

[mmj_uk]

AMD are seen as a dirty brand because of peoples' personal experiences with their products, just because there is a highly committed and vocal minority on internet forums who pretend that everything is hunky dory with their products doesn't change the reality of what people experience first hand when they buy into AMD.

NVidia and Intel charge premiums because people have experienced their products first hand and deem what they offer to be worthy of a premium, if AMD tried to match them they would be simply pricing themselves out of the market.

As things stand on the processor front you can buy an Intel quad core which has consistently fast performance all across the board and modern motherboards, or an 8 'mini core' AMD FX which can vary from a match for Intel's quad core to laughably slow depending on application and has motherboards which haven't been updated technology-wise since March 2010 (990FX is a rebadged 890FX). Then there are all of the other factors, heat, power draw, necessary cooling which is in Intel's favour.

Intel simply offer more elegant products, as do NVidia in the GPU market. AMD offer value and that's about it.

 

[humbug]

AMD are seen as a dirty brand because of peoples' personal experiences with their products, just because there is a highly committed and vocal minority on internet forums who pretend that everything is hunky dory with their products doesn't change the reality of what people experience first hand when they buy into AMD.

Well, that right there is a clear indication of some vocal members attitude on Internet Forums, anyone with a positive AMD experience is to be labeled as a fanboy.

Intel simply offer more elegant products, as do NVidia in the GPU market. AMD offer value and that's about it.

PS: i tested a 780, IMO its a toy compared with the 290, its a locked up cut-down play thing, thats why i went for the 290, a proper GPU.
I'm not the only one who thinks that.

NVIDIA do not support overclocking or overclockers!! Titan is awful without external VRM you put 1.35 in most instances its bang and boom!!! AMD stock VRM 1.55 no problem!! This tells you what Nvidia is about low return rates and low power states!!

What was that about user experience?

 

[Svyper1]

Only it's not true because the Athlon XP absolutely battered anything Intel could muster up yet AMD kept the costs down. So sadly they've already been given the chance yet still didn't extract the urine.

Then let's look at their graphics cards. Radeon 295X2 is £1044.99

Titan Z is £1999, the 295x2 is faster.

blah blah blah.

...only you're an AMD fanboy who can't see the wood from the trees...

Titan Z is only a smiggin slower ** FOR GAMES **. Computationally it's better especially for CUDA assisted...

Athlon xp? can you not quote anything that isn't 13 years old

that's the problem with fanboys can't get passed the fact that thy're has beens and were unable to adapt and have lost

 

[gpuerrilla]

Due to their own logic they are labelling themselves as intel fanboys then!

The thing about using and building PC's for over 10 years is being able to test out different hardware. I have owned about five intel CPU's and double that of nvidia geforce cards let alone the volume I have used to build other peoples machines. Personally I started building PC's in 1998 which is around the time dedicated GPU cards came about - way before "nvidia" typically 3DFX was the brand to get. Ironically the guy who co-founded nVidia was a designer at AMD!

Some of the posters on here when you discover their age will have only known of intel/nvidia which is the funny thing. Tarnishing people because they have or currently own AMD products yet have never owned one themselves can't really be taken seriously.

But who cares right?

 

[Emlyn_Dewar]

Only it's not true because the Athlon XP absolutely battered anything Intel could muster up yet AMD kept the costs down. So sadly they've already been given the chance yet still didn't extract the urine.

I remember the original FX lineup costing a fair whack...

 

[humbug]

Due to their own logic they are labelling themselves as intel fanboys then!

The thing about using and building PC's for over 10 years is being able to test out different hardware. I have owned about five intel CPU's and double that of nvidia geforce cards let alone the volume I have used to build other peoples machines. Personally I started building PC's in 1998 which is around the time dedicated GPU cards came about - way before "nvidia" typically 3DFX was the brand to get. Ironically the guy who co-founded nVidia was a designer at AMD!

Some of the posters on here when you discover their age will have only known of intel/nvidia which is the funny thing. Tarnishing people because they have or currently own AMD products yet have never owned one themselves can't really be taken seriously.

But who cares right?

Same, my fist build was a windows 95 of about the same year, i have owned and tested so many Intel / AMD / Nvidia.... CPU's / GPU's i lost count in about 2006.

They all have their good and bad with reasons to like them all, none are perfect.

Just because someone likes one and you like the other does not make you right and him wrong, that seems to be a constant theme over the past 20 years of custom PC's with those same members crying "fanboy" in some way or another when they find someone whose choice they don't agree with.

Its so old and tiresome now....

Be happy with your choice and let others be the same.

 

[ALXAndy]

I remember the original FX lineup costing a fair whack...

And AMD took a loss on every one sold.

...only you're an AMD fanboy who can't see the wood from the trees...

Titan Z is only a smiggin slower ** FOR GAMES **. Computationally it's better especially for CUDA assisted...

Athlon xp? can you not quote anything that isn't 13 years old

that's the problem with fanboys can't get passed the fact that thy're has beens and were unable to adapt and have lost

It could have been a hundred years ago, dimmy, the point still stands. AMD had a CPU that beat Intel yet didn't charge the earth for it. AMD have had numerous GPUs that have beaten the Nvidias yet, didn't charge the earth for those either.

Titan Z is slower, end of. Computational pah, Nvidia say it's a gaming card, same as the Titan Black. It costs double what the AMD does, yet still you can't do the maths. Not surprising really.

AMD fanboy. Yup, that's me. Intel 3970x @ 4.8ghz, Intel Xeon 8 core, Intel Westmere hex, AMD Athlon Kabini.

Totally an AMD fanboy yes.

 

[ALXAndy]

AMD are seen as a dirty brand because of peoples' personal experiences with their products, just because there is a highly committed and vocal minority on internet forums who pretend that everything is hunky dory with their products doesn't change the reality of what people experience first hand when they buy into AMD.

NVidia and Intel charge premiums because people have experienced their products first hand and deem what they offer to be worthy of a premium, if AMD tried to match them they would be simply pricing themselves out of the market.

As things stand on the processor front you can buy an Intel quad core which has consistently fast performance all across the board and modern motherboards, or an 8 'mini core' AMD FX which can vary from a match for Intel's quad core to laughably slow depending on application and has motherboards which haven't been updated technology-wise since March 2010 (990FX is a rebadged 890FX). Then there are all of the other factors, heat, power draw, necessary cooling which is in Intel's favour.

Intel simply offer more elegant products, as do NVidia in the GPU market. AMD offer value and that's about it.

pmsl what a conceited load of old codswallop.

Don't forget to smell your own farts now.

 

[Dave2150]

And AMD took a loss on every one sold.



It could have been a hundred years ago, dimmy, the point still stands. AMD had a CPU that beat Intel yet didn't charge the earth for it. AMD have had numerous GPUs that have beaten the Nvidias yet, didn't charge the earth for those either.

Titan Z is slower, end of. Computational pah, Nvidia say it's a gaming card, same as the Titan Black. It costs double what the AMD does, yet still you can't do the maths. Not surprising really.

AMD fanboy. Yup, that's me. Intel 3970x @ 4.8ghz, Intel Xeon 8 core, Intel Westmere hex, AMD Athlon Kabini.

Totally an AMD fanboy yes.

Basically it simply boils down to this:

If you want the best, buy intel. If you want something cheap, get AMD.

It mirrors well to real life. If you can afford it, you buy a nice, big, comfortable house. If you can't afford it, you get a cheap flat, terraced house, etc.

There's no denying Intel are the best. Yes AMD are cheaper. As to whether or not AMD kept their CPU's cheap when they were faster than intel (13 years ago), I don't think anyone really cares now, since it's 2014, not 2001.

Buy what you can afford, if you want to. Or don't. Choice is yours.

 

[Combat squirrel]

Why not benchmark a AMD 6 core vs an Intel 6 core both at say 4.5ghz ?, that would make sense for a like for like comparison.