On paper, AMD’s Bulldozer microarchitecture always sounded like a mean, green machine. When it landed last year, though, in the form of the Zambezi processor (aka FX-8150), it actually went about as fast as a bulldozer.
AMD didn’t just give up and curl into a ball. The company went back to work polishing the FX chip into the new AMD FX-8350 “Vishera.” The chip might look like a Zambezi, but it features an improved branch predictor, improved scheduler, larger L1 translate lookaside buffer, new FMA3 and F16C instructions, L2 improvements, among many other changes.
Vishera looks the same externally and the good news: it’ll use the same AM3+ socket too.
The best feature of Zambezi though is its backwards compatibility. Zambezi should work with most if not all AM3+ boards with a BIOS update and AMD is promising future chips will work with it as well.
To see how Zambezi stacks up, we used the same Asus Crosshair V board that we tested Bulldozer with more than a year ago and outfitted it with a GeForce GTX 580, 8GB of dual-channel DDR3/1600, OCZ Vertex 3 SSD and Windows 8. Why Windows 8? One issue that cropped up with the original Bulldozer chip was Windows 7’s scheduler didn’t know how to deal with the Bulldozer’s shared multi-cores.
For a comparison chip, we dusted off our old FX-8150 and set up a near identical Intel system using Intel’s Core i5-3570K on an Asus P8Z77-V Premium motherboard and Windows 8 as well. Why the 3570K? It’s the chip AMD uses as the benchmark for the FX-8350 and, frankly, our recommendation for the sweet spot of computing today.
The result? First, FX-8150 is still slow. It could barely compete with the Core i5-2500K last year and takes it on the chin in just about every test here from the Ivy Bridge-based Core i5-3570K. In fact, it was so slow in our Premiere Pro CS6 encode that we had to rerun the tests on both the Intel and FX-8150 because we couldn’t believe it.
You can’t deny the power of the individual Ivy Bridge cores though. We ran Cinebench 10 on a single core and the Ivy Bridge slaughtered both FX CPUs. In several of the gaming benchmarks, Intel’s more efficient cores also put it on top although we did see the FX parts unexpectedly pull ahead in the graphics department which are usually all the same when the same GPU is used.How about the FX-8350? Far better. In fact, we’d dare say the FX-8350 is very competitive with the 3570K in some heavily multi-threaded tasks and offers significant performance improvements over the FX-8150. Take for example, our Premiere Pro CS6 benchmark. It doesn’t trounce the 3570K, but it cuts the encode time in half over the FX-8150 part. In other tests it aces the Ivy Bridge part.
What do we recommend? If your chores are mostly limited to gaming and tasks that can’t exploit all eight cores, the Intel part has the advantage. If, however, you are rendering 3D, transcoding or rendering video (except in Adobe’s Premiere Pro CS6), the new FX-8350 should be your pick. It offers a longer socket roadmap and gives you better performance in multi-threaded apps. We do have to add though, that the performance gap probably isn’t as good as AMD fans would have hoped for considering the clock and core count difference between the FX-8350 and Core i5-3570K. Still, these days for AMD, a tie is probably good news considering its up against Intel’s best cores to date.
For a deeper dive on how well Vishera performs, click on for our individual benchmark highlights.
Comments are closed on this article
dakishimesan
October 23, 2012 at 3:20am
an honest question:
I was thinking, i know benchmarks are necessary to test relative performance, and we know from them that AMD does well in heavy threaded work, and Intel much better in IPC. Okay, but when you run a benchmark, it's just the benchmark and an otherwise idling system.
What if you had a benchmark that tested simultaneous normal tasks, such as virus scan/browser tabs/flash video/video compression/music playing/photoshop/etc all at once, the kind of stuff that we all do? When the system has more cores to submit thread work to, wouldn't that favor AMD?
I want to see that benchmarks -- all/some the other benchmarks running at once.
kevaskous
October 23, 2012 at 12:46am
Yes this is more promising of the ideals behind this design, we keep seeing these sort of improvements and this will be a winner quickly, next rig, AMD, for sure, support what I'm seeing without caring on the minor loss.
vrmlbasic
October 23, 2012 at 12:28am
I really wish that the benchmarks were interactive, that I could compare MaximumPC tests between this new AMD chip and older chips, where applicable. Specifically my older 955 Phenom II x4 which has served me well. A Phenom who will probably be put into another machine after seeing these benchmarks ;)
Say, what parameters did MPC use for its 7-zip tests? I fired up 7-zip and ran the benchmark with default settings and after one pass my "overall rating" is a mere 10,456 MIPS. This is less than half the performance of the new AMD chip, so I'm curious.
BTW, when is AMD coming out with a chipset to succeed the 990FX? It's getting a bit long in the tooth, AMD's FM2 boards are more feature-rich, their budget tech is beating what seems to be their flagship tech.
Neufeldt2002
October 22, 2012 at 9:32pm
Well, at least it is a step in the right direction. Hopefully we will see more steps in the right direction and get some competition from AMD.
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