Benchmark Results: Productivity

Presented with another threaded title like ABBYY’s FineReader, the FX-8350 barely trails Intel’s Core i7-3770K. Then again, FX-8150 was already outperforming the Core i5-3570K, so the tweaked architecture and higher clock rate only reinforce that result. Give this design a threaded application and it does well. Got it.

I swear I’m not purposely trying to mix things up by dropping in single-threaded tests right after the heavily parallelized ones. This is the same order I try to use in every review.

As if to remind us why FX-8150 got so thoroughly shredded upon its introduction, our Lame encoding workload shows a 4 GHz FX-8350 narrowly edging out the 3.7 GHz Phenom II X4 980 (which was introduced a year and a half ago, mind you). Although Piledriver appears to be an improvement over Bulldozer, AMD still has not matched the per-clock performance of its prior architecture, unfortunately.

We see the same outcome when we convert a PowerPoint presentation to PDF format—a single-threaded task. Vishera fares better than Zambezi, but all four Intel processors get this job done before the first AMD processor wraps it up.

Our Visual Studio benchmark sees FX-8350 cutting more than four minutes from our compile job—a better-than-10% speed-up compared to FX-8150. AMD’s latest cannot come close to Core i7-3770K, but the Piledriver-based processor does manage to best Intel’s Core i5-3570K.