AMD CPU/Socket Discussion Thread

Darren

Moderator
Staff member
Yes Darren but just as you're finding things are using the cores, you say it's time to upgrade, so was having 8 cores worthwhile when just as you found things were using them it was time to upgrade? ;)

Meanwhile, in the i5 2500K camp... ;)

The amount of money spent on your 2500K and motherboard was roughly what when you purchased it new? My motherboard at $100 and the 8320 at time of purchase was $160. Throw the air cooler in there for good measure because we all know AMD stock coolers are worthless and that's $290 USD. I'd guess that was probably cheaper than your setup. Also, I almost never stress my computer except for gaming and for gaming, particularly when I got it, the 8320 was equivalent in pretty much everything. Still holds true today really.

Slightly out of date but meh. Skip to 6:40 if you want to just see results.


Yeah I want to upgrade, but that's mainly because I just want to upgrade. :D I still am held back way more by the 7970 than the 8320 for what I do. The amount of times I'm truly limited by my CPU are few and far between and usually a result of mediocre optimization.
 

beers

Moderator
Staff member
And the 2500K is still faster by quite a bit.
Depends on the bench really. Integer/FP workload, various instruction sets, degree of multithreadedness. The FX are usually negatively viewed on specific workloads as a blanket statement and are underrated for a lot of other workloads.
 

Okedokey

Well-Known Member
Most consumer applications will show that the 2500K is stronger part. You can always find synthetic applications that will show otherwise, but as a general rule the 2500K still is better.

I almost never stress my computer except for gaming and for gaming, particularly when I got it, the 8320 was equivalent in pretty much everything. Still holds true today really.

No, just no. The 8320 is consistently slower in gaming, always has been. The 8320 was a dud-part, hot, power hungry and relatively poor performance. Anyone who says otherwise is either delusional or selective in their data reviews.

The benchmarks you showed above are bs, running a CPU at 1440p becomes GPU limited that's why the OCs made very little difference. If he had have used a suitable GPU, or SLI/CF it would've made a huge difference.
 
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spirit

Moderator
Staff member
The amount of money spent on your 2500K and motherboard was roughly what when you purchased it new? My motherboard at $100 and the 8320 at time of purchase was $160. Throw the air cooler in there for good measure because we all know AMD stock coolers are worthless and that's $290 USD. I'd guess that was probably cheaper than your setup.
It was about £300 which is $440 USD, but I live in the UK and stuff is more expensive here than in the USA. I can't remember how much the 2500K and an ASUS P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3 cost in March 2012 in the States, granted more expensive than the 8320 and a mid-range 970 board but I think it was worth it. I bought a higher-end board than you too so would have increased the price of my setup, I could have gone with the regular P8Z68-V or another Z68 board in the £80-120 region, likely still got my 4.3GHz overclock completely stable because 4.3GHz is a fairly 'average' overclock for a 2500K (my CPU and board had way more to give but my cooling wasn't great so it wasn't really stable past about 4.5GHz) and saved about £50-60 in doing so. Could have gone with P67 if I only wanted to overclock the CPU to save even more. Could've gotten a P67 board to match the board you have (the chipset 'second from top' if you get what I mean) and would still likely be using that too. :)

If you bought an FX-8320 and a higher-end board, like the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5 maybe (my guess is that board cost about the same as my P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3), both new in 2012 then yeah the AMD setup would have likely been cheaper but not by a lot (remember the price of the 8320 has dropped since its launch some 4 years ago), but I'd argue the Intel setup had more longevity. Sorry!
 
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Darren

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Staff member
440 USD vs 300 USD is a huge difference. If you did gaming performance side by side then the 8320 is clearly the better purchase for a teenager that works a near minimum wage job while in high school. It plays games that I want it to just fine, it was affordable and good price for the performance I got out of it, and it still does just fine.

This thread is about the AM4 socket, not the processor I bought two years ago. Move along.
 

spirit

Moderator
Staff member
440 USD vs 300 USD is a huge difference. If you did gaming performance side by side then the 8320 is clearly the better purchase for a teenager that works a near minimum wage job while in high school. It plays games that I want it to just fine, it was affordable and good price for the performance I got out of it, and it still does just fine.

This thread is about the AM4 socket, not the processor I bought two years ago. Move along.
Yeah but Darren your board was way cheaper than mine. Like I said, I could have knocked about £50-60 off my board, maybe even £70 at a push if I had gotten a board like yours. You're looking at $365 if that was the case or gone even lower with a lower-end chipset (that would have started to compromise overclocking though).

Anyway, let's just wait and see what the new CPUs are like. Really hoping they're decent so that the price of the Skylake or next gen Intel CPUs can come down to get some good rivalry going again. The Skylake CPUs are more expensive than the previous generations (which were all priced about the same from Sandy to Haswell or Broadwell, typically about £160 for the i5 K model and about £220 for the i7 K model). I know Intel will likely say they're more expensive because they have more technology, eg DDR4 support, but really I think it's because of lack of competition.

If AMD can produce a quad or hex-core for about £150 that can perform as well as an i5 6600K, overclocks well and runs cool then I think they'll be onto a winner. It'd be nice to have a proper i7 competitor too (maybe 8 cores for about £220 or so which is what the 4790K was priced at) because the 8320 and the 93xx and 95xx CPUs didn't really compete with the i7s (especially the 93xx and 95xx running hot and being very picky about which boards they worked in). Hopefully the new CPUs will run on a die smaller than the 32nm die the FX series ran on (didn't realise they were 32nm until now!) and that should mean temperatures and power consumption is reduced and it might also mean better overclocking, though actually the 28nm Sandy Bridge chips overclocked better than the 22nm Ivy Bridge and Haswell chips.
 

beers

Moderator
Staff member
I'm hoping for some of the extreme figure rumors to be true such as 32 threads. Even if each core is pathetic, that and being paired with ddr4 gives you a lot of available resources in a hypervisor environment
 

spirit

Moderator
Staff member
I'm hoping for some of the extreme figure rumors to be true such as 32 threads. Even if each core is pathetic, that and being paired with ddr4 gives you a lot of available resources in a hypervisor environment
AMD at it with the 'MORE CORES! (or threads)' idea again! :D

Nah if they do come with a 16 core / 32 thread chip that would be interesting to see how it would perform.
 

Darren

Moderator
Staff member
Why does that look like the same heatpipe design with a bigger fan? :p

At least they finally realized that dinky little sorry excuse for a "cooler" wasn't enough for an 8320 or even 6300 at stock clocks. My roommates 6300 was permanently throttling at 70oC while he ran it at stock clocks. Little jet engine had inhaled so much dust.

Hopefully this signals that stock coolers won't be totally useless this time around.
 

Darren

Moderator
Staff member
Forgot to post this here but the AM4 socket and motherboards should be in stores within the month I'd expect.

The new line of AM4 APU's called Bristol Ridge will be unveiled alongside the Polaris GPU's on June 1st.

Highlights
  • Excavator 28nm Chip (not 14nm Zen)
  • First AM4 chip
  • DDR4-2400 RAM Support
  • 20% graphics increase over Carrizo/Steamroller APU's
  • Dual and Quad Core variants
  • 35 and 65 watt TDP variants
  • Crossfire support
  • Up to 3.7/4.2GHz turbo clock speed
  • Expected to have mobile versions

For those of you that don't follow or know AMD's recent architectures I've put together a list of their progression. They have both code names and product line names, which is confusing. These are all of the architectures that were based off of the initial Bulldozer chips. It took me a while to get this all figured out because AMD didn't know what the hell they were doing for a few years.

Each marked increase is over the previous generation and are guestimations from the reading I've done. IPC increases are clock for clock and not accounting for clock speed changes. Again this is a rough outline but should give you an idea of what they've been doing. I didn't really appreciate how much improvement had been made over Bulldozer from the start.

Bulldozer AM3+ CPU's (FX 4100, 6100, 8150)
  • IPC = Bad
  • 4100 had a TDP of 95 watt with a 3.8GHz turbo, compare to Bristol Ridge below

Piledriver/Vishera AM3+ CPU's (FX 4300, 6300, 8350, 9590)
  • Currently the "high end" desktop CPU's
  • 15-20% IPC increase

Steamroller/Kaveri FM2+ APU's

  • Die shrink to 28nm but still Bulldozer based
  • 10-15% IPC increase

Excavator/Carrizo FM2+ APU's
  • 10-15% IPC increase
  • 30% graphics performance

Excavator/Bristol Ridge AM4 APU's
  • 10-15% performance increase due to DDR4 RAM
  • Down to 65 watt TDP for a quad core at over 4GHz in addition to the 8 graphics cores

So we're several steps past the efficiency of the Vishera chips at this point and on significantly lower power consumption and similar clock speeds. These should make viable laptop chips, which are planned. It also will be nice to give the market time to get a good basis of AM4 boards and lower prices before Zen rolls out. The combination of APU's and CPU's into a single socket is a good move as it will allow people to truly start out budget and eventually be able to upgrade to a high end CPU.


http://wccftech.com/amd-7th-generat...res-4-x86-excavator-based-cores-8-gcn-30-cus/
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10223/amd-bristol-ridge-in-notebooks
 
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Intel_man

VIP Member
I just hope AMD gets their **** together and make something that can compete with Intel's performance chips. Maybe not 5960X performance, but definitely as a minimum, compete with the 6600k and if they can the 6700k.

I'm getting sick and tired of Intel's pricing based solely on their mentality of "Because we can and what are you going to do about it? Go AMD? LOL".
 

Darren

Moderator
Staff member
I just hope AMD gets their **** together and make something that can compete with Intel's performance chips. Maybe not 5960X performance, but definitely as a minimum, compete with the 6600k and if they can the 6700k.

I'm getting sick and tired of Intel's pricing based solely on their mentality of "Because we can and what are you going to do about it? Go AMD? LOL".

What you don't like paying $340 bucks for a 6700K that's only 25-30% faster than the 2600K that came out 5 years ago? Also might be wrong but I think some of that percentage is just from clock speed increase. I'm kinda fudging based off some benches I found but it's obvious they're so expensive because they have nobody to compete with. It's crappy but when AMD can't make anything more than budget that's what happens.

http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-2600K-vs-Intel-Core-i7-6700K/621vs3502

I still think Intel will sit at the top for the true high performance chips but I think AMD will definitely fill into the 6600K/6700K performance bracket and be priced competitvely, which is what's needed really.
 

spirit

Moderator
Staff member
If AM4 is going to be here within the next month then that's sooner than I was expecting, even if the Zen chips don't arrive until October! Good to see AMD moving again!

I have a feeling that hardware enthusiasts are holding their breath for Zen more so than any other hardware release in a long time! I certainly am and I'm by no means an AMD CPU fan (also in the literal sense, of course ;)).
 

Intel_man

VIP Member
From the black hole benchmark, the 6700k is 18% faster then my processor per core. Which isn't much. considering a 4 year difference.
 

Darren

Moderator
Staff member
I just hope AMD gets their **** together and make something that can compete with Intel's performance chips. Maybe not 5960X performance

Ask and you shall receive apparently.

http://wccftech.com/amd-zen-cpu-performance-double-fx-8350/

AMD-Zen-Performance-Double-FX-83501.jpg




Looks like they have an 8 core Summit Ridge "Zen" CPU slated for October launch and even higher gains than expected

I'm dubious of this claim, but apparently they originally stated 40% increase clock for clock over Piledriver is looking to be more, even 60%.
 

Intel_man

VIP Member
Yea... except the 6950X is coming out...


But I do hope what AMD claims in that article is true. Maybe Intel will reduce their prices. :)
 

Darren

Moderator
Staff member
Yea... except the 6950X is coming out...


But I do hope what AMD claims in that article is true. Maybe Intel will reduce their prices. :)

But the 6950X isn't anywhere close the market that Summit Ridge is aiming for. The 5960x costs $1k right now, and this chip is probably going to be 300 or so.
 
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