Results: Audio And Video
We already know how this is going to play out. On a per-core and per-clock basis, AMD's Piledriver architecture cannot match Intel's Haswell, Ivy Bridge, or even Sandy Bridge designs. But in threaded applications, the FX-6300's six integer cores should be in an entirely different league than Core i3.
At 4 GHz, the FX-6300 is roughly 25% slower than a 3.3 GHz Ivy Bridge-based processor in iTunes and LAME. But we weren't targeting single-core performance with our processor selection or overclocking approach, so we're just happy to see that our manually-tuned setup is able to match the chip's stock performance with Turbo Core enabled, meaning we don't give up any speed in lightly threaded workloads.
Sure enough, the Piledriver design strikes back with huge performance advantages in the threaded HandBrake and TotalCode Studio workloads, leaving the Hyper-Threaded Core i3 far behind. Overclocked, the FX-6300 bests Intel's stock Core i5-3350P at 3.1 GHz. Using AMD's boxed cooler, however, we couldn't hit high enough frequencies to challenge four tuned Ivy Bridge cores.
