Fx 8350 CPU Drivers?

There is no such thing as a CPU driver. Whatever driver you're looking at, it's for something else in your system.

All right, guys, here's the deal: Yes, there IS such a thing as a processor driver. Yes, it is silly to think about a driver telling your processor how to run itself, but there is a flaw in that reasoning that represents a fundamental lack of understanding of what a driver is, what it does, the function and purposes of an operating system, and how the two interact. There is a driver for EVERY piece of hardware in the pc...bus drivers, sound, video, ACPI systems...heck, there is even one for that little speaker that goes beep when you turn on your pc. The BIOS knows how to make it go "beep". Depending on your mobo and sound card, Windows can do a lot more with its driver. The CPU driver tends to be fairly standard amongst families, so the Windows default AMD FX driver should work nicely...and you have an instance for each core x too. The AMD A series processors have capabilities the Windows standard set does not provide for, so a trip to AMD's website is necessary...basically, it allows different AMD components to interoperate to do things like facial recognition for autologging in to social media accounts, gesture commands, etc. With the A series, at last, there was also something weird where the gpu and "apu" could work together on most modern amd video cards and offload process to either for load balancing. This would have to be handled by both the cpu AND gpu drivers, as far as task scheduling and load balancing...anyway, you have one, but it's handled out of the box with the os. Now, it's up to you too find multithreaded software.

I'm gonna have to stop you right there....
Don't worry, i understand when you're in the heat of the moment thoughts race faster than your hands can type... but i just need to fix this, and to hell with the Necro, as some people, including myself, will google this topic up and get the wrong impression from misleading information.

To correct what you said there...
The A series is the short name of and blanket term for all models of Accelerated Processing Units, and they named it the APU, because that's even shorter.
An APU is simply put, a CPU and GPU... so speaking to someone who doesn't know what you were attempting to say, you can easily confuse them, like i was...

IF you're talking about the APU speaking with a Discrete GPU meaning an add-in expansion card for Graphics, to perform a Hybrid CrossfireX much like what used to be available on much older Integrated Radeon HD 4000 series motherboards and cards, then yes AND no, only very specific cards will work with specific APU's, meaning, you can't just grab one of each and expect it to work.

IF you were talking about the unit only, as in the CPU and GPU, aka "APU" then again you are correct and much more so with the "weird" label, however not too foreign, Intel has been doing this before AMD. Intel HD Graphics are what inspired AMD to make the APU, with GPU accellerated CPU's you can process more for less. for instance, a laptop APU could alleviate the heat build up while processing large quantities of data, thus performing better than just a CPU + GPU configuration laptop. less hardware also means lighter, and smaller, allowing for fairly small and lightweight configurations.

The APU requires Drivers only because of the GPU side of the chip, it does not require any drivers for the CPU side. Otherwise you would never be able to use it without first already having the OS installed, to use the driver, to install the OS.... just went Paradoxial there.

On to CPU's, the FX CPU isn't technically a natural 8 core, its nothing at all like the hand puppet 8 cores like Intel, using "HyperThreading" to force each core to use TWO threads, no, FX processors are actually 8 cores, 8 threads, however...

With an older Quad core, like a Phenom II x4 980 BE, it is a CPU with 4 cores... this will start to get hard to follow....
Imagine this...
a standard quad core, cut each core in half, 8 halves right?
But then instead of making each core independent like with older generation quad core cpu's...
Take the four spots and split the cores into pairs of cores, kinda like... adding a second quad core CPU without all the junk in the middle.
So, each module has two functional cores, just the same as though they were the older quad core, but smaller, and more complex.
These modules though, need special instruction, HOWEVER...
the CPU is backwards compatible to hardware that has been around for years...
How?
Well, the instruction set for operating the 8 cores is not stored in the BIOS, no, the BIOS see's the CPU initially as a quad core....
but now what happens is the CPU itself has its own instruction set to then instruct on how to use each pair of cores...
but that's starting to get confusing right?... yes, starting to.
after the CPU is awakened into life by the BIOS, the CPU sends out its instruction set to the BIOS telling the BIOS how to really use it...
Much like how the GPU communicates with the BIOS...

So, yes Drivers are needed to use the CPU, and NO you do not, and will never need to install or download any such drivers for the CPU, as it installs them every time the PC turns on, JUST like a GPU.

i forget which it is, the CMOS or the BIOS that stores the data of the hardware, but after your first boot, it shouldn't have such long inter-hardware communications, since the instructions are stored, all it does is confirm the Hardware is the same.

The quoted issue, just fyi:
Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductors are where the Basic Input/Output System stores it's settings and info, for the most part. I'm not trying to act smart or condescending, that's just how I differentiated when I was taking my A+ the first time, many years ago...by remembering what each stood for. Old COMPAQ's used a 4 MB partition at the beginning of the hard drive. I'm not sure if anyone else has continued with that annoying practice.

Next:
Yes, I hate old threads with bad info. Google turns them up all the time, people let it pass because they're "dead threads" and consequently, it's impossible to find any good info because the one good piece of information is burried beneath all this crap...it's like a needle in a haystack...a big haystack that also contains Henny Hen (chicken little) running around, screaming "the sky is falling" and a hundred conspiracy theories about how hyper-threading is really just a government tracking system...How can you be sure one of those hyper-threads isn't a hyper-speed line sending the gober-mint all of your personal datas over a secret wireless link...you don't even have to be connected to the interwebs and they can STILL track you, man... I do digress, but for this reason alone, if I am able, I correct. Basically, I do agree with most of what you said, but...

I only really go into this because I have had to go through a windows update in order to get a new processor to function properly...which sucked because I didn't have internet access at home and it was a tower that I had hooked up to a projector--no chance of running to Starbucks for internet real quick. The reason was that the windows disk came out before the processor came out and the windows disk had no driver for it. It would only utilize one core out of eight until I received the proper drivers from Microsoft.

Multi-threading/hyper-threading is not automatic. Neither are any of the other processor-specific functions They aren't handled by the BIOS or the CPU. The BIOS recognizes the hardware and passes the information on to the operating system. The BIOS, for all that the setup screen boasts, is only capable of using a single core to load the OS on boot-up Once the OS begins to load, whether it be windows, linux, or any other OS, the OS takes over. At this point, the BIOS is only really responsible telling the OS what time it is, what hardware exists, and then for some of the most basic hardware operations, most of which have to do with the motherboard dependent portions of the physical hardware interface. The OS and the software determine what instructions are sent to the CPU, and how the CPU and it's core or cores operate. Each processor has a kernel level driver for the CPU and each operating system has a different method of handling multiple cores. My Windows 7 box runs all 8 cores when I'm rendering in solidworks or cutting STP files to send to the 3D printer--basically, any software optimized for multiple threads. When I have eight normal programs running, they tend to all want to run on one core, except when I'm running off of my linux partition that's set up to load balance between cores. As a programmer, I understand a little bit more... Windows and linux, at least, have common interfaces for almost every type of hardware out there. This includes the CPU and the driver functions (for this purpose) basically like a translator between the common interface and the specific brand/type of processor (or other type of hardware). The programmer tells the OS how many cores to use and what to have each core do...if the given task is even the type of task that can have independent parallel computations running...a lot of computations depend on the result of the last computation, so must be run linearly, which doesn't benefit from multiple cores, anyway.

As far as the APU-GPU interface, I wasn't trying to say it was weird as in unique, but weird in principle...and I would say the same of the Intel HD, athough I don't recall if the Intel system allowed offloading non-graphics related CPU load to the GPU as the APU's seem to boast. I haven't seen an actual example of it being done, but I know is some of the data I had on the APU's indicated it was possible.

In the end, we are in agreement that the devices DO have drivers. We also agree that you will never have to go to AMD for a CPU driver. You probably won't even find one on their site. 99% of the time, your standard windows installation disk will have everything you need, but with new hardware, sometimes you must invoke the dreaded windows update (and then go back and re-set half of your privacy, firewall, antivirus, etc. settings) to get the right drivers to make everything work like it's supposed to.