What is your take on AMD's new processor?

[tano-urayoan]

"Ultimately Vishera is an easier AMD product to recommend than Zambezi before it. However the areas in which we'd recommend it are limited to those heavily threaded applications that show very little serialization."

[Ozymandias]

Too little too late.



If you look at performance data alone, it may sound attractive for the price, but once you factor in power consumption and OC.... not so much.

[Modern Times]

Interesting, didn't realise my X6 1100T outperforms an i5 2500K. Of course once you overclock the positions would reverse.

[M ANSARI]

The key point here is overclocking. The Intel cpu's can overclock reliably to very high rates which dramatically improves their performance.

[Milos]

The key point here is overclocking. The Intel cpu's can overclock reliably to very high rates which dramatically improves their performance.

Really????
As far as I understand different processor philosophies, AMD was always far superior than Intel for OC.
Moreover, the whole AMD philosophy was OC openness. AMD boards support natively all OC options, everything is unlocked and easy to OC. With Intel the story is completely different. One of the reasons is that post production selection in Intel is far more thorough and while AMD releases a family of processors with 2, max. 3 operating frequencies Intel releases it with 10 different frequencies, because it already classifies its processors according to speed in very narrow batches. In this way Intel spends much more money in post production but earns a lot after selling. AMD has a different strategy.

For example I have Phenom II X6 1055T (nominal clock speed 2800MHz) running completely smoothly at 3500MHz with a stock cooler (and nominal voltage, no OV). I've only replaced it because it was too noisy. With a new (20 bucks price tag) cooler it is now running stable and smooth at 3800MHz and produces very low noise. 3800/2800=1.36x gain for 20 bucks. No Intel processor can beat that.
Sure from initial 125W peak power consumption it jumped to 150W, which is a lot for a processor, but still running 24/7 the whole year it is only 1300KWh which taking electricity prices on the world market is around 100-150 bucks. If somebody told me that's much and then justified buying processor that costs 5x that number I'd just think of him as economically illiterate.

[M ANSARI]

Would be interesting to see what overclocked setups are for both AMD and Intel. By overclocking I would mean that speed is increased to reveal the "true" speed of the CPU and not overclocking in a sense of pushing the CPU to speeds that need specialized cooling. Intel is notorious for selling CPU's below their "true" clock speed simply for marketing reasons and most of their low end CPU's are actually underclocked. Would be very interested to see how AMD's top end 8 core does overclocked against Intel's top choice. To be honest I would love nothing more than to see AMD beat Intel performance wise, but Intel has been kicking AMD's butt ever since Core 2 came out.

[Albert Silver]

The key point here is overclocking. The Intel cpu's can overclock reliably to very high rates which dramatically improves their performance.

Really????
As far as I understand different processor philosophies, AMD was always far superior than Intel for OC.

(...)

For example I have Phenom II X6 1055T (nominal clock speed 2800MHz) running completely smoothly at 3500MHz with a stock cooler (and nominal voltage, no OV). I've only replaced it because it was too noisy. With a new (20 bucks price tag) cooler it is now running stable and smooth at 3800MHz and produces very low noise. 3800/2800=1.36x gain for 20 bucks. No Intel processor can beat that..

The OC margin and ability to do so with no modifications is very dependent on temperatures too. I live in Rio, and the lowest temps you'll ever see are 15-16 C. (nighttime in a storm), but the rest is quite warm. I know I NEVER get the temperatures I read about in reviews or other.

How big a temp diff do you see in your processor from default to upgrade at full load?

[Milos]

Would be interesting to see what overclocked setups are for both AMD and Intel. By overclocking I would mean that speed is increased to reveal the "true" speed of the CPU and not overclocking in a sense of pushing the CPU to speeds that need specialized cooling. Intel is notorious for selling CPU's below their "true" clock speed simply for marketing reasons and most of their low end CPU's are actually underclocked. Would be very interested to see how AMD's top end 8 core does overclocked against Intel's top choice. To be honest I would love nothing more than to see AMD beat Intel performance wise, but Intel has been kicking AMD's butt ever since Core 2 came out.

I think Intel has a different strategy for low-end and high-end processors. While low-end ones tend to be underclocked, high-end ones are tightly divided into batches of frequencies to squeeze a buck out of them as much as possible (since they are very expensive anyway especially compared to AMD).
However, what changes perspective I think is that by increasing the clock frequency for the same percentage from the nominal one, you get better benchmark results for Intel than for AMD.
However, these are synthetic benchmarks and they usually don't work very well for chess. In chess the performance increase (in nodes/s) is pretty linear with frequency increase for both AMD and Intel.

There is also one more thing that helps Intel and that's nominal TDP (Termal design power) which is significantly lower than with AMD processors which means they are easier to cool down while overclocking.

To answer your question (and I agree with the point about "real" overclocking not some specialized cooling BS) the latest Bulldozers probably can be overclocked to a higher frequency percentage-vise from the nominal than latest Ivy Bridges (for example FX-8350 vs. i7 3770K). However, the relative performance gain (in synthetic benchmarks) of latest Intels would be higher than of latest AMDs.
I believe for chess that wouldn't be the case.

[Milos]

The OC margin and ability to do so with no modifications is very dependent on temperatures too. I live in Rio, and the lowest temps you'll ever see are 15-16 C. (nighttime in a storm), but the rest is quite warm. I know I NEVER get the temperatures I read about in reviews or other.

How big a temp diff do you see in your processor from default to upgrade at full load?

The ambient temperature plays a big role. My room temperature (where my computer case is) varies from 18 to 25C depending if it's winter of summer.
If you room temperature goes over 30C I can envision a serious degradation in cooler performance.

However, almost equally important as CPU cooler is case cooling. I could see big differences in temperature (more than 10C with full load) with closed case and no case fans active and open case or all case fans carefully placed and working.

To answer your temperature question, with stock cooler in idle I would get around 30 and 35 with nominal speed and overclocked respectively.
With better cooler (and better selection of thermal paste) I would get in idle 28 and 32 with nominal speed and overclocked respectively.
Much bigger difference is noticeable under full load.
The stock cooler would get around 55 and 68 with nominal speed and overclocked respectively, while better cooler would get around 48 and 58 respectively. And all that with being at least 20dB lower in noise.

[jpqy]

Here some reviews:


AMD FX-8350 vs Intel Core i7-3770K @ 4.8GHz

Read more: http://vr-zone.com/articles/amd-fx-8350 ... z2AEKeAtnQ

Or all collected links here:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/sho ... ot-reviews

JP.