Results: Synthetics And Applications
We're adding five other CPUs to the mix for our performance comparisons. The FX-8370E represented at three different clock rates takes the total number of bars to eight. Intel’s Core i7-4790K hails from another price range of course, but we still wanted to show what a Haswell-based CPU also capable of scheduling eight threads can do.
Per-clock performance is AMD's most glaring problem area. What happens when an application runs on just one core? The outcome is demonstrated nicely by Cinebench's single-threaded benchmark.
It's made clear in this test that AMD’s new CPU runs at a lower clock rate. Taking scaling into account, we’re basically left with the same performance that AMD’s other FX processors offered. At 4.2 GHz, the FX-8370E nearly catches the non-E version. Haswell blows them both out of the water, though. AMD has nowhere to go but up, and it's a shame that we don't have a Steamroller-based eight-core chip to fold into our chart. The A10-7800 is as much representation as we get from AMD's most modern architecture.
The situation improves when all eight of the FX's integer cores are utilized. Comparing AMD to Intel's Core i7-4790K still yields an ugly outcome, but the Core i5 isn't able to keep up as well in this case.
Well-parallelized tasks tasks allow the CPUs able to handle more than four threads at a time to show off. This is another well-deserved high point for AMD’s new processor.
Unfortunately, real-world tasks typically aren't as dramatically optimized, so they knock AMD's FX-8370E back down to earth. At least the 4.2 GHz configuration almost keeps up with the non-E version.
We could have added more synthetic and application benchmarks, but they wouldn't change the bottom line. Over the past few years, we've covered the Piledriver architecture in much depth, including this Vishera-based implementation. At any given frequency, we know how these CPUs fare, and that won't change due to an optimization for power consumption.
The AMD FX-8370E is an interesting option for processing-intensive applications able to exploit more than four cores. Then again, the competition sells even faster processors available at lower power ceilings, if you have more money to spend.
