AMD K6 and FX-8350 Re-Visited Against Modern CPUs: Ryzen up to 910X Faster

AMD K6 and FX-8350
(Image credit: AMD)

A pair of tech reviewers recently reviewed AMD's pre-Ryzen CPUs dating back to 10 and 26 years ago to see how they would fare compared to today's modern games and hardware. The reviewed parts include the infamous FX-8350 from 2013, and the AMD K6 launched in 1997.

The K6 was benchmarked by redditor Technologov (via boringtextreviews) and shows how much progress AMD has made in CPU performance since the K6 was released. Unsurprisingly, he compared the K6 to AMD's flagship Ryzen 9 7950X to discover this and found some truly impressive figures. For example, in the LFK benchmark, a single core of the Ryzen 9 7950X was a whopping 46 times faster than the K6, with a score of 1,294 points compared to just 28 on the AMD K6.

However, this first benchmark run accounts for just one core on the 7950X; with all 16 cores and 32 threads against the K6, the Ryzen part was 910 times faster than the K6 with a score of 25,476 points.

Obviously, we would expect a nearly 30-year-old CPU to perform exponentially worse than a brand-new chip. Still, the fact that a CPU can physically be 910 times faster than any of its predecessors is an incredible figure to behold.

What this does tell us is how unimaginably far CPU development has come since the 1990s. Of course, CPUs have changed dramatically since then, with transistors now operating on the nanometer scale instead of the 0.35-micrometer process used in the K6, the introduction of multi-core CPU technology, 64-bit support, clock speeds that span well over 1GHz (not to mention 5GHz), and much faster and larger CPU caches. (Not to mention the nearly innumerable architectural improvements in CPU logic since the K6 was released.)

The K6 was originally launched in April of 1997 as the successor to the K-III and a competitor to Intel's Pentium II. The chip had just 8.8 million transistors, an incredibly large 0.35-micrometer lithography, just 64KB of cache, and a clock speed of up to 233MHz. In retrospect, your home blender or toaster probably has a higher clock speed than this CPU.

For more details on this CPU, check out our K6 reviews from 1997 and 2008. Now on to the decidedly more modern but still somewhat ancient AMD FX-8350. 

FX-8350 Still Outputs Playable Frame Rates Today, Even in Hogwarts Legacy

YouTuber RA Tech also did a re-visit of another CPU, this time the infamous AMD FX-8350 that launched in 2012. He compared the CPU to several modern titles to see how capable the chip is after ten years. The games he chose include Forza Horizon 5, Dying Light 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Apex Legends, Warzone 2.0, Spider-Man Remastered, and Hogwarts Legacy.

The chip performed surprisingly well after overclocking and could output highly playable frame rates in most of the games, even at high settings — including Forza Horizon 5, Apex Legends, and Warzone 2.0, with frame rates above 60FPS. However, in the other three, he found the games were significantly more intensive, resulting in sub-60 fps gameplay most of the time at any graphics setting.  This was particularly true of Hogwarts Legacy and Spider-Man Remastered, which approached around 30 fps in the most intensive areas.

Based on what we've seen from modern gaming CPUs, the FX-8350 in RA Tech's review holds up surprisingly well and delivers frame rates akin to the 30 fps mode found on consoles in a worst-case scenario while providing above 60 fps in lighter games. The only problem with FX-8350 is that it exhibited wildly fluctuating frame times, which will noticeably impact the game's smoothness due to an inconsistent frame rate across a span of time. Though, with some tinkering, and a frame rate limit, you could probably rectify this issue.

The FX-8350 launched in 2013 as the successor to the wildly infamous FX-8150 that debuted a year earlier. The chip featured eight cores, eight threads, a 4.2GHz boost clock, and around 16MB of L2 and L3 cache combined. The chip was largely criticized for its unusual behavior in multi-threaded applications, being both faster and slower than Intel's competing quad-core CPU solutions (depending on the workload) despite having eight cores.

This was due to AMD's unorthodox Piledriver architecture and how it splits processing power between the cores. Physically the chip had eight cores, but functionally the chip could only behave like an eight-core part in integer calculations since the floating-point unit was shared between two cores. As a result, you had a CPU that realistically performed like a quad-core CPU under the right conditions. That eventually led to a class-action lawsuit over the FX-8350, which AMD lost. 

Nonetheless, the CPU still outputs surprisingly good frame rates today, and you could still get by with an FX-8350 if it's all you have. But, if you are looking for a CPU upgrade, any CPU made in the past six years will easily overrun this CPU.

Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

  • bdcrlsn
    IMO, the AMD Bulldozer/Piledriver processors were good ideas on paper. They could hold their own in multi-threaded programs, but these processors were not designed for single-threaded ones and the era these processors were in was decidedly lacking multi-thread optimized applications.
    Reply
  • Ah, the good old FX bulldozer debacle I still remember. I have owned an FX 6350 CPU before.

    AMD created confusion as they advertised FX-8350 as having 8 cores, and the claim that a shared FPU unit within a 'dual core' module does not constitute an actual core of performance similar to a separate core/FPU unit.

    AMD based the core count on the number of integer cores, and pitched its Bulldozer processors as the first 8-core desktop chips. This was a bad move actually, but I liked the bulldozer's architecture/design at that time. The Legacy still lives on !

    You know OLD is GOLD after all. :D

    Actually, technically it is impossible for an eight-core Bulldozer-powered processor to truly execute eight instructions simultaneously – it cannot run eight complex math calculations at any one moment due to the shared FPU design.

    On the other hand, Intel cores, for what it's worth, had their own separate floating-point math units.
    Reply
  • King_V
    Ah, this reminds me . . I've still got Old Ironsides sitting in a room now, with its FX-6300. Not as much grunt as the 8350, but still. Just sitting. That said, I fired it up a short while back, to install the fanless Sapphire HD 6670 card, which stays nice and cool due to the fan in the side of the case blowing right on it.

    And, I really, REALLY need to fire up my old PC with the AMD K6-2+ 400Mhz CPU. It ran the last time I booted it, but, uh, that was a while ago. 192MB of RAM, if I recall correctly. Odd sort of configuration, but I remember that it was all SDRAM sticks with the same CL or same overall timings.

    Quite a long while ago. I wonder if it'll still work...
    Reply
  • SunMaster
    How the 8350 performs probably illustrates how ridiculously overpowered todays CPUs are for gaming, At least the current generation of games.
    Reply
  • jeremyj_83
    What is impressive against the K6-500 is that the 7950X's clock speed in ST applications is only 11.5x higher. That means another 35x of performance gains are all from uArch developments over 26 years.
    Reply
  • jeremyj_83
    SunMaster said:
    How the 8350 performs probably illustrates how ridiculously overpowered todays CPUs are for gaming, At least the current generation of games.
    Or it shows that games today are better able to take advantage of the FX's strange uArch design.
    Reply
  • gfg
    Error in the publication: it was not a first generation AMD "K6" as indicated here, it was a "K6-2 500".233 Mhz vs 500 Mhz makes the 46 times make more sense. Since it marks a IPC of 400% and not 200% if it were a first generation K6.
    In any case, 4 times more IPC seems little to me, it is obviously not optimized software.
    Ryzen 7000 vs the Athlon FX 8350 there is already an increase of ~2.6 times, against a K6 it should be around x10.
    Reply
  • hotaru.hino
    SunMaster said:
    How the 8350 performs probably illustrates how ridiculously overpowered todays CPUs are for gaming, At least the current generation of games.
    A lot of it I would argue has to do with how games over the past decade finally started spawning more threads to do work. They may not do a whole lot of work on their own (there's still usually 2-3 threads that are really active), but it's certainly better than having that all done on a single thread.

    jeremyj_83 said:
    What is impressive against the K6-500 is that the 7950X's clock speed in ST applications is only 11.5x higher. That means another 35x of performance gains are all from uArch developments over 26 years.
    I'm more curious about what sort of instructions were actually ran on the LFK benchmark to characterize where might these improvements come from. For instance, if they ran a version of it that took advantage of SIMD extensions, then that shows the strength of the uArch, but it's not necessarily an apples to apples comparison since the K-6 wouldn't even have SSE.
    Reply
  • SunMaster
    hotaru.hino said:
    A lot of it I would argue has to do with how games over the past decade finally started spawning more threads to do work. They may not do a whole lot of work on their own (there's still usually 2-3 threads that are really active), but it's certainly better than having that all done on a single thread.

    Agreed. And eventually I think the incredible focus on single thread performance will if not "go away" so at least be far less meaningful. I'm not talking about tomorrow :-)
    Reply
  • gfg
    jeremyj_83 said:
    What is impressive against the K6-500 is that the 7950X's clock speed in ST applications is only 11.5x higher. That means another 35x of performance gains are all from uArch developments over 26 years.
    11.5x ???
    35x ???

    7950X / K6-2 500 = (1294 pt / 5700mhz) / (28 pt / 500 mhz)
    7950X / K6-2 500 = (227 pt x Ghz ) / (56 pt x Ghz)
    7950X / K6-2 500 = 4,05x IPC or +305% IPC

    this benchmark does not do justice to the instruction set on a 64-bit Ryzen 7000
    Reply