AMD FX 4350: Could someone explain why the general opinion towards AMD processors is so low?

propranolulz

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Apr 22, 2014
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Long time lurker, first post. Not trying to troll. Just curious about why it is that intel "enthusiast" processors are typically considered to far outperform most anything AMD has in that range (I understand intel to be clearly superior at the high $$ end), specifically for gaming. I don't know a lot about processors but I'm curious.

For example, I use an AMD FX4350, which has very favorable benchmarks for gaming. 3dmark score is higher than any i3 or i5 processor.

http://www.futuremark.com/hardware/cpu/AMD+FX-4350/compare

Could someone explain why this does not translate to better performance (assuming it doesn't) in gaming and why, on my next build, I should make the switch? Thanks.
 

popatim

Titan
Moderator
Not that I have much preference myself. There are some tasks that the current amd chips are really good at, such as rendering and you can built a system thats comparable to a high end intel at a significant savings but intel rules the intense computational load arena. For example it takes an 8 core fx chip to match/beat an i7 which is a 4 core processor. To me its not about cores this or that, its about getting the work done
 

leeb2013

Honorable
during the Athlon days, I always had AMD, but my latest build was Intel. I like the strong single core performance, lower power and thus heat. Rightly or wrongly, I always think AMD throw in more cores and power to get their performance up, where-as Nvidia and Intel go for efficiency and performance. That said, the R9-290 was better value for me, so I got that.
 

vmN

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Oct 27, 2013
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AMD is running with a clustercore technology. (What they call modules)

They are running with dual ALUs per core (whereof Intel is having 4), which means their single-core performance is lower.

Both cores share the frontend, which under heavier workloads can end up starving their pipelines. (hence why both cores total performance it degrease by around ~10% under heavy workload).

Having both cores in the module share the SIMD, can make some type of workload a nightmare for bulldozer and its successors.

 

Vitric9

Distinguished
I don't think the opinion of AMD CPUs are low. They have a spot in the market and always will. The performance and technology is a quite a bit slower than Intel and that is just a fact. lets SAy the FX 4350 6350 and 8350 are there performance CPUs. These CPUs are part of the platform codenamed Piledriver as you probably know. But this Piledriver Technology is quite old. The Phenom II 955 or 965 have very similar clock for clock performance. Take the Intel Core i7 2700K (Sandy Bridge, 2011) and see how much better it performs in almost any task or application. And in single-threaded work loads it is not even fare to compare. but what AMD has and maybe since acquiring ATI, have a exellent price to performance ratio for games. Battlefiled 4 is AMD optimized to the letter. And I am not talking about GPUs. The FX 8350 is going to be a force is games over the next few years with Mantle and DX12 making better use of Multi-core processors. I mysef have an Intel CPU and I really like it. But when You compare a $300+ i7 3770k to an $180 AMD 8 core CPU. and the performance in games is very close and in some cases AMD wins out.
 

propranolulz

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Apr 22, 2014
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Yeah, reading all the links I've really been shocked at how similar the fx series is in performance to the Athlon. That and AMD has the edge in some games like Crysis 3 that seem to really get a boost from 6 cores over 4.

I wonder why AMD was unable to offer much in terms of improvement in performance per core with the piledriver series.. From the performance end, it does seem like all they did was add cores.