Thoughts on the current AMD Lines...

[Anox]

Although AMD have hit a massive low recently, let's take a look upon what processors they have churned out. I am referring from the Semprom line all the way up to the Piledriver series that have been released.

The Semprom and Athlon series were rolled out as main weapons by several oems as a cheap but sufficient processors meaning a huge influx of budget systems flooded the pre built market. They were effective for what they were capable of, but for not much else really. I think that the Athlon II x4 640 was a little gem of a chip at that point. We also saw the first quad core under £100, the Athlon 620. - Courtesy of Davedree

The Phenom series was the staple market for AMD for a long time, and the huge range of it reflected that. It seriously lacked behind Intel's boom in computing power, but still provided a massive market for the price per core. I believe this is what kept the Phenom alive for that much longer. The 6 core thuban was seen as the best of engineering by AMD by providing such a good performance to price.- Davedree again, Ill just add anything else people want.

Then Bulldozer-FX came along. Despite a hyped release it was dubbed a 'faildozer' by critics for it's instability and finickiness with RAM. I feel that this is not so, in fact I find it still at an aggressive price point for the user with a lower budget. We saw the introduction of an eight core processor, which in my opinion compensated for falling behind Intel's Core I series by providing those cores. Albeit, it still was flawed.

Piledriver-FX quickly jettisoned onto the scene, following the apparent failure of the bulldozer. I think these did improve vastly on Bulldozer's failures, and were much more stable at higher clocks. In my opinion, the Piledriver is up there with the Core-i5.

The FM2 platform seems to be the saving grace for AMD, It seems to have caught on as a good niche for low-mid end gaming and HTPC uses, It is entirely possible that AMD could be going down the APU line much more in depth.

The question is, what will the future hold for AMD?

What are your observations guys?

~Anox

 

[Orcvader]

They seem to be pushing heterogeneous computing as well, which allows both the CPU and GPU to work together on certain workloads. This should allow their APUs/CPU+GPU to compete against Intel if the developer codes the software to take advantage of hardware acceleration. I can see this caused Intel to ramp up their IGPs now though, and is playing catch up on that. AMD has the lead thanks to it's acquisition of ATi, but looking at how Intel is showing off Haswell's IGP against a 650M, I feel AMD may fall behind the APU in a few years side as well.

As for Bulldozer, I feel it has potential here, they managed to squeeze two cores in one module that's still about the size of a normal core. The more they improve it, the better multi-threaded performance, which seems to be the direction they're heading at.

 

[Anox]

There certainly is a distinct advantage with two chips under one die, and the huge processing capacity an eight core processor provides is certainly attractive to users.

Problem is also that some ATI employees, quite high up ones indeed up and left with apparently more than 100,000 documents on ATI development tech going straight to Nvidia. Just before CES. Ooer, It looks a little pear shaped for ATI at the min.

 

[decto]

As a frequent AMD buyer over the last 20 years, they are currently at least a manufacturing node behind Intel in addition to lower core efficiency.

When Intel are kicking out dual core Celerons for £30 with IGP which are more than sufficient for an acceptable windows experience it's a tough market to compete in.

The APU route is effective when outright performance isn't key especially in nettop and laptop installs. Given the low cost of large screen monitors and TV's APUs are still a little short for gaming unless you buy a 100W part which isn't ideal. AMD badly need some low wattage high performing APU's

We need AMD in the game to keep Intel honest, but it is becoming harder to go green.

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[Wucked]

The more I read on AMD the less hopeful I am of their survival, they seem to be teetering on the edge atm. Although their discreet graphics division will probably continue under new ownership. It would make a tasty acquisition for Intel.

I did read that AMD are working on some ARM based chips though, so there may be a glimmer of hope.

 

[Davedree]

Although AMD have hit a massive low recently, let's take a look upon what processors they have churned out. I am referring from the Semprom line all the way up to the Piledriver series that have been released.

The Semprom and Athlon series were rolled out as main weapons by several oems as a cheap but sufficient processors meaning a huge influx of budget systems flooded the pre built market. They were effective for what they were capable of, but for not much else really. I think that the Athlon II x4 640 was a little gem of a chip at that point.

It was the 620 that was the first quad core to be priced under £100

The Phenom series was the staple market for AMD for a long time, and the huge range of it reflected that. It seriously lacked behind Intel's boom in computing power, but still provided a massive market for the price per core. I believe this is what kept the Phenom alive for that much longer.

Can you edit this bit above please as you aren't quite correct, firstly phenom agena/barcelona was a bit of pooper in comparsion to intels core duo and quads this was due to 65nm, l3 cache size and frequency scaling, + software didn't make much use of more than 2 threads. However phenom II/shanghai on the 45nm process gained ground and competed well with intel core 2 duo/quad offerings. although still behind nehalem,amd was still strong in the server land. You have also forgotten to include the 6 core thuban and the performance it offered for the price in comparison to intel nehalem. Thuban in my opinion was one of amd's most impressive acts of engineering

Then Bulldozer-FX came along. Despite a hyped release it was dubbed a 'faildozer' by critics for it's instability and finickiness with RAM. I feel that this is not so, in fact I find it still at an aggressive price point for the user with a lower budget. We saw the introduction of an eight core processor, which in my opinion compensated for falling behind Intel's Core I series by providing those cores. Albeit, it still was flawed.

Piledriver-FX quickly jettisoned onto the scene, following the apparent failure of the bulldozer. I think these did improve vastly on Bulldozer's failures, and were much more stable at higher clocks. In my opinion, the Piledriver is up there with the Core-i5.

The FM2 platform seems to be the saving grace for AMD, It seems to have caught on as a good niche for low-mid end gaming and HTPC uses, It is entirely possible that AMD could be going down the APU line much more in depth.

The question is, what will the future hold for AMD?

What are your observations guys?

~Anox

But otherwise I agree with your points. I think the future for not just amd but intel is that they'll concentrate on soc designs, cloud computing and smart tvs with integrated apus. You just gotta take off the enthusiast pc geek glasses and look at the average person and what they use a computer for and its not hard to see that a tablet meets 90% of their needs. So the desktop will eventually die but I cant predict a timescale on that.

My main observation and its well debated is that hardware on the x86 cpu side has slowed down in performance gains, but just become more power efficient.
on the gpu side performance has increased but the refresh of new series have slowed down since the 32nm was cancelled. I feel that software coding isn't making the use of the current gen hardware, and development in pc graphics has been disapointing, in that I feel like we havn't made much progress in that last few years.

 

[stuie]

My concern isnt with amd tbh its with the computer industry in general as we all now battling leaky gates as manufacturing processing gets smaller is a big issue. With very little alternatives to silicon in the pipeline i wonder at what point will progression just stop as we hit limits. with no major financially viable breakthrough in bio mechanical engineering i can see major problems ahead over the next 5 years

 

[mmj_uk]

Piledriver isn't a great deal better than Bulldozer, the only thing that really saves it is the 8350 is very aggressively clocked to the point where heat is borderline a problem even at stock (unless you ignore tests like Prime95), there's very little headroom for overclocking if you take stability seriously.

Piledriver and i5 might be similar performance wise in some tasks (Piledriver still gets destroyed in a lot) but i5 is a lot less hassle to cool and you don't need motherboards with monster VRM cooling either.

 

[Hagar]

I have always had at least one AMD system going. High spot for me was the Thoroughbred 1700+ in terms of overclocking and (singlecore) cheapness.

I now have an FX8350 fully prime stable at 4.6Ghz and none too noisy at that with Phanteks cooling. Will do many render tasks at 5GHz.

I do not consider the 8350 aggressively clocked at stock, but agree that the die size requires good cooling and that the stock cooler is noisy.

Power draw is very similar when overclocked to an overclocked i7, but idle power is higher.

I also like the following,

• Pins on the processor
• High bus clocks 300+
• Lots of threads.
• Virtual machines

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

People only concentrate on the FX8350 and this is probably a slightly more leaky part made for overclocking.

OTH,if you look at the FX6300 it matches or exceeds the FX6200 in most cases,while having a lower 95W TDP and lower power consumption.

It does appear,the CPU actually spends more time at the higher Turbo levels I suspect than the FX6200. For example if you look at BF3 MP,the FX6300 is significantly faster than a FX6200:

http://www.pcgameshardware.de/Battl...ld-3-Multiplayer-Tipps-CPU-Benchmark-1039293/

 

[Omaeka]

AMD have some nice budget CPU's but thats all they are, and the Piledriver isn't as budget friendly as people think, as you'll be shelling out a fair whack for a power supply to feed it compared to a 3570k. It's still cheaper despite that, but it doesn't have the future proofing of the IB, and there is only so long that AM3 can keep going, so with the next AMD or the one after, you'll eventually need to bite the bullet and jump to a new motherboard, you may aswell do that now IMO and get a z77. I've always seen AMD as the Mitsubishi Evo or the Nissan Skyline compared to Intel who are the Ferrari/Lambourghini of the market. The former may still be fast and not at all bad for the intent they were built for, but what would you prefer?

Also the Bulldozer was just that, a bulldozer with a tank of NoS stuck on it, such a slow, unstable CPU. They also need to seriously think of their names better, would you want a CPU named after a slow, cumbersome construction vehicle? Or after something that digs holes in soil? What happened to awesome names like the Phenom, the Sempron or the Athlon?

'The Secateur' AMD Fx-12750, or 'The Spade'. You heard it here first folks.

 

[Hagar]

AMD have some nice budget CPU's but thats all they are, and the Piledriver isn't as budget friendly as people think, as you'll be shelling out a fair whack for a power supply to feed it compared to a 3570k.

Not entirely true, eight cores at 4.6GHz priming + heaven benchmarking on an HD6950 at the same time, I have never exceeded 480w total system power at the wall. This compares with 420w for the 1090T at 3.8GHz + heaven.

 

[Omaeka]

Not entirely true, eight cores at 4.6GHz priming + heaven benchmarking on an HD6950 at the same time, I have never exceeded 480w total system power at the wall. This compares with 420w for the 1090T at 3.8GHz + heaven.

Nice one. Do you know how to find the w that your PC is currently using? I'm interested in finding out.

 

[Hagar]

Nice one. Do you know how to find the w that your PC is currently using? I'm interested in finding out.

I am not at home ATM but have run some analysis previously. I use a power meter plugged into the wall socket
Results from testing at the plug, using prime95 in each case on all cores, eight for piledriver, six for 1090T.

4.6GHz, 1.392V and 55C core temp on PD,
3.8GHz, 1.376V and 51C core temp on 1090T

Idling,browsing, office both were comparable at 130-140 ish.

Full prime all cores, 290W for 1090T and 350W for 8350.

Full prime all cores plus heaven 2.5 bench running on 6950 gave 420W for 1090T and 480W for 8350.

 

[Omaeka]

So there isn't any software at all which can show power usage? Part of me wants to keep my 6850 for Crossfire but I'm not sure what power my rigs using and don't want to upgrade my PSU.

 

[Hagar]

So there isn't any software at all which can show power usage? Part of me wants to keep my 6850 for Crossfire but I'm not sure what power my rigs using and don't want to upgrade my PSU.

No, no software. The power (energy) testers are about £10.99 upwards and can be found at several online retailers who I cannot link to

 

[V F]

I've always seen AMD as the Mitsubishi Evo or the Nissan Skyline compared to Intel who are the Ferrari/Lambourghini of the market. The former may still be fast and not at all bad for the intent they were built for, but what would you prefer?

That sounds more like the x79 line... or maybe 6 core Xeon's. 1k - 2k a chip? All the other Intel's are like Jaguar's, Aston Martin's?...

 

[ubersonic]

AMD are struggling at the moment that's for sure, their flagship CPU can't compete clock for clock with Intel or core for core so they load more cores onto it to try and make up the difference like ATi and 3DFX did when Geforce arrived. Performance per £ is good and their low end chips can beat Intels however but it can't be denied that the only reason AMD are currently competitive is because Intel are letting them be (so they can be slower to innovate and maximize profits).

AMD's APU's are very good however they are a niche market, anybody not looking to game can buy Intel and get a better CPU and "good enough" iGPU, wheras those intending to use a dedicated GPU are also better with Intel.

Ironically the best thing AMD has going for it right now is its GPU business as its got next gen console contracts lined up and its GPU's are currently offering better bang per buck than Nvidias.

People like to root for AMD because their the underdog, they are the number 2 CPU company and the number 2 GPU company and im no exception I have been a long time AMD fan however it does seem they have somewhat lost their way a bit, they really need to find a way to get more CPU performance so they can start competing with Intel, however atm it seems like they are flogging a dead horse like Intel were with netburst Pentium 4/D/etc before moving onto Core.

 

[TommyV]

I remember when AMD were the favoured CPU.

Had so much pride all those years ago overclocking my AthlonXP 2500+ to 3200+ ^^

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

as you'll be shelling out a fair whack for a power supply

People only look at Prime95 and think that equals normal power consumption in some weird way. When I use IBT for stress testing, I never see the CPUs run anywhere near that temperature when gaming for example. Different workloads can lead to very different power consumption levels.

People really overstate power consumption. I was running an overclocked Q6600 using an inefficient 975X chipset, with a massively overclocked HD5850 in a Shuttle SD37P2 SFF PC. The PSU was an older generation Shuttle 450W job and it was fine.

Very few reviews seem to measure gaming power consumption for example.Here are the only two I can find so far:

http://www.legitreviews.com/images/reviews/2055/system-power.jpg

http://img.hexus.net/v2/cpu/amd/Piledriver/FX8748/Power3.png

The first review used a HD7970 IIRC and the second a GTX680. So in BF3,the FX8350 based system consumes around 40W more than a Core i7 3770K based system at the wall.

In both reviews,the FX8350,Core i7 3770K and Core i5 3570K based systems are consuming less than 300W,when the CPUs are at stock clockspeeds, at the wall using a high end graphics card and inefficient high end motherboards.

Anybody with a decent 500W PSU should be fine running the systems.