Maximum PC

Maximum PC had some interesting results, which made me think that AMD might be a viable solution for areas where CPU is more important than GPUs.

But the fact remains as a consumer level part, AMD's plans are flawed and they really need to rethink what they're doing.

Not really, even the 3570K with 4 less threads to work with & a 600MHz dissadvantage still holds it's own against the 8350 while using less power. Spend $100 more & the 3770K wipes the floor with the 8350 & still uses about 53 Watts less power. Sadly, the 8350 is a generation to late... it is what the 8150 should have been.

BTW... that extra $100 for the 3770K on a machine running 24/7 (for example a dedicated folding @ home box) at $0.12 per KWh would be made up in just over 18 months. So if you build a dedicated folder with the 8350 at a lower cost now, at the end of a 4 year run it would end up costing you a good bit more (possibly hundreds more depending on your cost per kWh) than a 3770K system despite the lower intial cost.

Chris (Toms Hardware review) is right, the old "FX" processors used to raise Intel's eyebrows, but the new "FX" is just something for Intel to laugh at.

I could have waited & gave the 8350 a try, but this is pretty much what I expected to see from it. This is why I chose to drop $900+ on a new LGA-2011 mobo & 3930K processor instead of spending just $220 to drop an 8350 into my old 990FX board.

Don't get me wrong, this is a step in the right direction, but AMD is barely taking baby steps when they need to be taking leaps.

The stink of it is... if Bulldozer & now Piledriver had been true 8-core products instead of the shared FP bullshit they're crawling behind, they would have been competitive CPU's. True, they still would have lagged behind in IPC, and probably would have increased the power usage a bit, but they would have had an 8350 that would probably have fallen somewhere between the 3770K & the 3930K.

i am looking at the benchmarks now(btw thx for links). i still have a amd+ mobo getting dusty, this will prob. b my last amd build.

i was expecting a 15-20% improvement, after a year wait, im very disappointed.

still if i can find a 8350 for $195 ill go for, if only to utilize my mobo.

amd, if your watching this, get a stick and beat yourself with it, you need 2b punished.

I'm wondering something here, the overall performance of AMD's processors is low because of the IPC performance. I'm wondering why. The whole modules vs. core things shouldn't matter, because a lot of benchmarks in use tend to favor integer operations than floating point ones (Anandtech made this a point to test integer and floating point performance).

What's the flaw here? How can AMD be even more inefficient with their processors? The IPC performance of Bulldozer can be seen as worse at times compared to Phenom II.

Does AMD need better engineers? How can they still excel at GPUs, but suck at CPUs?

because they bought their gpu division and stayed out of its engineering department. amd has always missed the boat in some things, consider cache, they never use enough, and never have. Intel learned long ago that more cache=faster.

Uh. No. Intel needed more cache back in the day for two reasons (possibly)

• Prescott's jaw-dropping 36 or something stage pipeline. If you missed anywhere in predictions, that's a massive penalty to take versus the 20 some stages found elsewhere.
• Intel didn't have an on-die memory controller

Also, AMD has 8MB of L2 and L3 cache in Bulldozer. Intel only has 6MB in L3 and 256KB L2 for each core.

Not to mention, if you add more cache, eventually your latency for looking through it will be greater than just looking it up in RAM. Remember: you don't know if the data you need is in cache. However, it's always in RAM (well, usually).