AMD's Piledriver And K10 CPU Architectures Face Off

So much BS, the old Phenom II X4 and X6 BE are still really competitive after all these years. Yet, if they bother to update the instruction set, and just shrink the thing, then change it to AM3+ socket, that would be great...
K10 has so much more potential...

Personally, I was surprised to see the FX-4350 do so well. The bump up, compared to the FX-4300, has really done it some good.

Kelvin, the tests showed that the Piledriver FXes are not that far off the Phenom IIs clock for clock and core for core. The Phenom II X4 965BE at 4.0 GHz was generally about as fast as the stock FX-4350 running 200-400 MHz faster so you figure about a 5% per-clock, per-core advantage for the Phenom II. However, each Piledriver core is quite a bit smaller than a K10 core and they also have a longer pipeline so they can clock quite a bit faster (K10 was pretty well tapped out.) So you get more cores and more clocks out of Piledriver with essentially the same performance per core and per clock. I'd say that the modular architecture used in the FXes finally got the vindication it deserved with this test. Way to go Tom's.

As I was going through this, at first I was worried about the absence of comparison to Intel, but was relieved to see it at the end. Especially if I don't want to push my 970BE really hard (I'd rather play on my PC than with it), the FX-63x0 looks like a viable upgrade.

I want some juice GPU news. I am aware they are not going anywhere fast with CPUs. My wallet will be open for 8 core in 2 years when performance Increases 20%

I just want some solid numbers on Steamroller already.

Thank you so much for writing this article. Thank you also for including the Phenom II 965 processor to this test. I use it, and it is somewhat dated, and hard to find compared to newer cores. However it still kicks a lot of butt in gaming. I bought my Phenom II 955BE C3 last year with overclocking in mind

I always wanted to see how it would compare to newer models, and even intel counterparts. Thank you for this. I loved reading the article. Keep comparisons like this coming.

I also wanted to add, thank you for listing the 965BE with overclock at 4Ghz. It's easy to clock this processor up to those speeds. That's about what I run at, and it also runs much greater than stock speeds. This is important in future comparison tests. Thanks again.

Wanted to see i3 and i5 CPUs on the charts. Not just in the "Wrapping things up" section. Also, why not compare to a i5-3470? It's locked, cheaper, and still fast.

if the 6350 is so close to the 3570k the 8350 eats it alive..and everybody recommends the i5 ^-. AMD has still good value

You should have added some Phenom II X6 CPU's

The main thing I hate about FX CPU's in the IPC. companies like intel have steadily increased the IPC of their CPU's while with AMD, going from Phenom II to the latest FX, they significantly reduced the IPC of their CPU's, and furthermore the resource sharing of the cores (by going with core modules instead of true cores). if similar resources are stressed, performance suffers as shown in the link below

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/138394-amds-fx-8350-analyzed-does-piledriver-deliver-where-bulldozer-fell-short/2

AMD would have done better by improving upon the phenom II and making an 8 core version.

I currently use a Phenom II x6 1075t overclocked to 3.9GHz
in cinebench 11.5 I get 7.01 points Which is still acceptable even by todays standards.

Northbridge is at 2.6GHz and hyper transport is at 2.08GHz

The highest I can push the CPU is about 4.4GHz but those speeds require around 1.575 volts, meaning I cant load the CPU to 100% for very long unless I take more drastic measures of connecting a vacuum hose from the case air intake to the air output of an air conditioner (to siphon off some of the cold air)

If you want to see just how bad the fx is compared to phenom II, clock some phenom II's and some FX's at the same clock speed, then do a range of benchmarks.

Athlon X4 750K is the King of budget, its replaces Phenom 955 and it gives the same performance and sells for dirt cheap = 80 USD + lowest power usage.

if i had dime every time i hear :

if Only AMD optimized there K10 arch ..., 8 core k10 will be much better ...

Are you serious, K10 have evolved for years and reached its wall, we talking about semprons --> athlons ---> Phenoms 1 ---> Phenoms 2 ---> AMD FM1 APU`s

And The Phenom 965 using 45nm as seen in the above chart uses 180Watts on load and upwards ...

So wake up people, if there was any untapped resources in k10 AMD would have popped them.

Also an index of cinebench single threaded performanc results from my research is :

Sandy Bridge/ivy/and haswell (no real innovation since SB, and those 10% CPU improvements, only adds 0.0x) :

i3 = ~1.3x Point
i5 = ~1.5x point
i7 = ~1,8x point

AMD :

AMD Athlon a8-3850 k10 CPU 0.8 Point
AMD Phenom x6 1100T (BEST AMD K10 CPU) 1.08
Richland A10-6800K ~1.11 point.

All above results all from my research and wether you want to simply belive or better go research yourself is your choice, but AMD have problem in Single threaded perfomance, and the way they hided back day was giving more cores, like the Phenom x6 in CInebench Multi threaded it scores ~6.0 points even the lowert 1050T scores 5.9 point, and all intel i5 CPU does not go up than 5 points.

but adding real 6 cores is trouble and problematic and too much power and resource hungry for BULK designs using BULk materical, remeber those x6 can reach 200W and upwardes, and more there costly and there prices does not budge.

Since Bulldozer first design, there have been many fixes and improvements, and Pilediver is only the first step forward, next step is steam roller, with each step steadily enhancements are being made, not can be much said about k10 that after 3-4 steps forward it froze.

I have been waiting for this test since I first heard mention of it.

Fantastic work! am always harvesting older chips to cobble together some frankenstein machines - or even just buying newer parts to do the best possible super budget machines for friends - so this is a godsend. Thanks for the wide selection of games too - some reviews just do a handful which doesn't give a broad enough picture. Icing on the cake is the comparison to the intel chips, including that 8400. Even the global (fix the spelling on the chart) wattage is v interesting. Very nice.

Oh man, I would have loved to see Richland-based Athlons in the test!

Thanks for the article but I would have liked to see the Thubans in action and I reckon' the 8350 would have topped the results.

i missed the fx8320 in the crysis 3 benches. compared to the core i5 3570k stock framerates, the fx6350 (stock and o.c.) seemed ahead in these articles' crysis 3 benches.

Many people like the Phenom II (including me) because it had a better IPC. the FX8350 can beat many of the high end core i7 CPU's if something is perfectly multithreaded, but for most tasks, it loses out to a 4 core intel CPU (even if they disable hyper threading), and that is because current intel CPU's offer a higher IPC. a single fast core is better than 2 separate cores at half the speed each.

Intel is offering a good balance between multi threading and single threading performance by having CPU's that can give more than 2 points per core in applications such as cinebench.

Clock for clock, the phenom II is significantly faster than the FX series.

If they cannot put 8 true cores on a single CPU, then they need to work on releasing a quad core with an IPC that rivals the intel CPU's.

Lower IPC is a step in the wrong direction, FX is the wrong choice.

I want see a clock to clock single core comparison between Athlon FX 57 (939, ddr), Phenom (AM2, ddr2), Phenom II (AM2+ ddr2 and AM3 ddr 3 1333/1600), "new" Athlon FX (AM3+, ddr3 1866).

Really enjoyed this one. Thanks Tom's

(minor quibbles...) For completeness, it would have been nice to see the FX-8350 lining up. And perhaps include the 3570k in the individual results as a benchmark, for context (Though I realise this was an AMD roundup, of course).