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| Introduction and Specifications | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Even before AMD officially released its Bulldozer-based FX-Series of desktop processors last year, the company was already talking about the follow-on microarchitecture codenamed “Piledriver”. In fact, in the conclusion of our launch article featuring the AMD FX-8150, we posted an AMD-provided slide that showed Piledriver was already on-deck and that it would offer IPC and power improvements over existing architectures, which would result in roughly a 10% to 15% uplift in performance.
Before we dive in talk about the new AMD FX-Series, we should call out a few past HotHardware articles which are pertinent to today’s product launch. Although the FX-8350 we’re going to be showing you here today is a new processor, it leverages technologies we’ve previously covered.
The new FX-Series processors, at least for now, will be paired to existing chipsets and motherboards, so we won’t be talking about a totally new platform, like we had to with Trinity and the recently released A-Series APUs. AMD’s latest FX-Series chips use socket AM3+ and are designed for use with previously released AMD 9-Series chipsets, like the high-end 990FX. If you’re unfamiliar with first-gen FX-Series based on the Bulldozer microarchitecture and want to brush up on the features of the 990FX chipset and the newer Piledriver microarchitecture, the list of articles above is a good place to start. |
| Vishera / Piledriver Microarchitecture |
Like the recently released A-Series Trinity-based APUs that came before it, the new Vishera-based FX-Series processors leverage AMD's Piledriver microarchotecture. As we've noted before, AMD has either tweaked or revamped many of the primary functional blocks with the Piledriver microarchitecture versus the original Bulldozer which debuted last year. Although much has been changed, Piledriver is essentially an optimization of AMD's Bulldozer core. It shares the same high-level architecture as Bulldozer, but with a number of major enhancements. The same shared fetch, decode, floating point and L2 cache resources per pair of integer units is present in Vishera, however, AMD has improved their branch prediction and L2 efficiency and improved hardware prefetch as well. Piledriver cores also have a larger L1 TLB or Translation Look-aside Buffer.
All told, AMD is claiming a combined performance increase of ~14% on the desktop versus their Bulldozer architecture. However, factor in higher Turbo Core 3.0 speed boosts and AMD is claiming larger aggregate performance gains.
With Vishera, AMD's Turbo Core technology offers more aggressive clock gating and overclocking. Specifically, the FX-8350 that we'll be showing you here can scale up to 4.2GHz, in single-threaded applications, but has a base clock of 4GHz with dynamic scaling as needed in single or multithreaded workloads. |
| Vital Signs and Overclocking | ||||
The new AMD FX-8350 uses the same packaging and socket as previous-generation FX-series processors, based on the Bulldozer microarchitecture. As such, save for some markings atop the chip’s integrated heat-spreader, the new AMD FX-8350 looks just like its predecessor.
As we’ve already mentioned though, the main differences between the new FX-series and the previous gen, are the new processor’s updated Piledriver microarchitecture, which offers a number of performance and efficiency enhancements over Bulldozer, and the new processor’s more advanced 32nm manufacturing process.
Here is an up-close-and-personal look at the FX-8350 as reported by the latest version of CPU-Z. As you can see, the FX-8350 uses AMD’s existing AM3+ socket infrastructure. If you remember, socket AM3+ was an update to the older socket AM3, and although pin-compatible, AM3+ adds support for CPU voltage loadline, increased ILDT current for higher frequency HyperTransport links, increased DRAM current, and two memory channels with official support for speeds of up to DDR3-1866. All of these features are exploited on the AMD FX-8350.
In the end, we were able to take the FX-8350 up to a stable 4.7GHz. Unfortunately, due to time constraints and an incompatibility with AMD OverDrive and our test-bed’s motherboard, we don’t have accurate temperature data to share at this point. But considering how easy it was to take our CPU to 4.7GHz, we suspect that higher clocks will easily be possible with more exotic cooling and more aggressive voltage tweaking.
As an interesting aside, overclocking the FX-8350 to 4.7GHz resulted in a Cinebench R11.5 score of 7.94, and increase of 1.01 or 14.5% over the stock score of 6.93, and enough of a boost to overtake the Core i7-3770K. |
| Test Setup and SiSoft SANDRA | ||||||||||||||||
Test System Configuration Notes: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set the memory speed to each platform's highest, officially supported frequency--1866MHz in the case of AMD's newest FX series processors. The solid state drives in the test systems were then formatted, and Windows 7 Ultimate x64 was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we fully updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software, performed a disk clean-up, cleared any prefetch and temp data, and ran the tests.
We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2012, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2012 suite with Intel's new Core i7 "Ivy Bridge" processor (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Memory Bandwidth, and Cache and Memory). All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor running at its default clock speed of 4GHz (4.2GHz Turbo) with 8GB of DDR3-1866 RAM running in dual-channel mode on the Asus CrossHair V Formula motherboard.
SiSoft SANDRA didn't reveal any surprises with the AMD FX-8350. As expected, the FX-8350 proved to be faster than the previous-gen FX-8150 across the board, but it couldn't keep pace with the higher-end Intel Core i5 or Core i7 processors. According to SANDRA, the FX-8350 / 990FX combo put up just shy of 19GB/s in the memory bandwidth benchmark and the Cache and Memory test shows relatively high latency until the data set hits about the 512K mark, where the FX-8350 then becomes more competitive with other platforms.
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| Futuremark PCMark 7 | ||||
Futuremark's PCMark 7 is the latest version of the PCMark whole-system benchmarking suite. It has updated application performance measurements targeted for a Windows 7 environment and uses newer metrics to gauge relative performance. Below is what Futuremark says is incorporated into the base PCMark suite and the Entertainment, Creativity, and Productivity suites--the four modules we have benchmark scores for you here.
The PCMark test is a collection of workloads that measure system performance during typical desktop usage. This is the most important test since it returns the official PCMark score for the system
The new AMD FX-8350 offered clearly better performance than AMD's previous flagship desktop CPU, the FX-8150, in PCMark 7. Unfortunately for AMD, even the Core i5-3470 has no trouble outpacing the FX-8350 here, in every one of the PCMark 7 tests and the overall score. |
| LAME MT and SunSpider | ||||||||
In our custom LAME MT MP3 encoding test, we convert a large WAV file to the MP3 format, which is a popular scenario that many end users work with on a day-to-day basis to provide portability and storage of their digital audio content. LAME is an open-source MP3 audio encoder that is used widely in a multitude of third party applications.
In this test, we created our own 223MB WAV file (a hallucinogenically-induced Grateful Dead jam) and converted it to the MP3 format using the multi-thread capable LAME MT application, in both single and multi-thread modes. Processing times are recorded below, listed in seconds. Shorter times equate to better performance. The new AMD FX-8350 performs much better than its predecessor in our custom LAME MT benchmark, but it gets crushed by every one of the Intel processors we tested.
Next up, we have some numbers from the SunSpoder JavaScript benchmark. According to the SunSpider website:
All of the systems were tested using the latest version of Internet Explorer 9, with default browser settings, on a clean install of Windows 7 Ultimate x64.
The SunSpider benchmark results essentially mirror those of the LAME MT benchmark above. The new FX-8350 offers much improved performance over the previous flagship FX-8150, but the 8350's performance still lags behind anything from Intel here. |
| Cinebench R11.5 and POV-Ray | ||||||||
Cinebench R11.5 is a 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation suite used by animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding of processor resources and is an excellent gauge of pure computational throughput.
This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders a photorealistic 3D scene (from the viral "No Keyframes" animation by AixSponza). This scene makes use of various algorithms to stress all available processor cores. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented in the graph below.
The AMD FX-8350 offers improved performance over the previous-gen FX-8150 in both single and multi-threaded workloads according to Cinebench R11.5. The FX-8350 is also able to overtake the Core i5-3470 in this test and nip at the Core i7's heels.
POV-Ray, or the Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer, is an open source tool for creating realistically lit 3D graphics artwork. We tested with POV-Ray's standard 'one-CPU' and 'all-CPU' benchmarking tools on all of our test machines, and recorded the scores reported for each. Results are measured in pixels-per-second throughput; higher scores equate to better performance.
POV-Ray proved to be somewhat of a strong point for the new FX-8350. In this benchmark, the FX-8350 once again offers improved single and multi-threaded performance over the FX-8150 and is also able to overtake all of the Intel quad-core processors. Only the 6-core, and much more expensive, Core i7-3960X was faster. |
| Low-Res Gaming: Crysis and ETQW | ||||
For our next set of tests, we moved on to some in-game benchmarking with Crysis (DirectX) and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (OpenGL). When testing processors with Crysis or ET:QW, we drop the resolution to 1024x768, and reduce all of the in-game graphical options to their minimum values to isolate CPU and memory performance as much as possible. However, the in-game effects, which control the level of detail for the games' physics engines and particle systems, are left at their maximum values, since these actually place some load on the CPU rather than GPU.
The performance trend in our low-res gaming tests is a repeat of most of the tests from the previous pages. In both Crysis and ET: Quake Wars, the new AMD FX-8350 offers significantly better performance than the previous-generation FX-8150 due to its architectural and frequency advantages. However, the FX-8350 still trails even the "slowest" of the Intel processors by a large margin in these game tests. |
| Total System Power Consumption | ||||
Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we also monitored how much power our test systems consumed using a power meter. Our goal was to give you all an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling and while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the processors alone.
The new Piledriver-based AMD FX-8350 is clearly more efficient than the previous-generation FX-8150. Not only did the FX-8350 offer clearly better performance than its predecessor, but it did so with lower idle and peak power consumption. While it's an improvement over the previous-gen FX though, the new 8350 still uses much more power than the higher performing, Ivy Bridge-based Core i7-3770K. Intel's current processors are simply in another league in terms of power efficiency due to their architectural and manufacturing advantages.
We also monitored the FX-8350's power consumption while we had the chip overclocked. As you can see, boosting the chip up to 4.7GHz (with a model +.03v bump in voltage) resulted in a huge increase in power consumption, to the tune of almost 100 watts. Although there is some headroom left in the chips, AMD is obviously pushing the envelope with the FX-8350's default boost clock of 4.2GHz. A less than 10% increase in frequency and a tiny bump in voltage resulted in a 41% increase in power consumption. |
| Performance Summary and Conclusion | ||||
Performance Summary: The FX-8350 is the most powerful desktop processor released by AMD to date. The improvements afforded by its updated Piledriver microarchitecture, in addition to significantly increased frequencies, have resulted in a processor that clearly outperforms its Bulldozer-based predecessors across the board. And it does so while consuming less power, which hints at its improved efficiency as well. Unfortunately for AMD, while they have eaten into Intel’s lead in the desktop CPU space somewhat, they have not changed the performance landscape all that much. Intel’s higher-end Core i5 and Core i7 processors, are still the highest performing and most efficient desktop processors available.
The initial Piledriver-based FX-Series product line-up is going to consist of four processors, ranging from the high-end FX-8350 at $195 to the more mainstream FX-4300 at $122. The processors will differ in their core counts, Northbridge frequencies, base and Turbo CPU clocks, cache compliments and TDP. Please note, however, that all of these initial FX-Series processors will feature the same die; quad and hex-cores listed here will feature the same 8-core die with a core module or two disabled. At the FX-8350’s expected price point, it goes head-to-head with Intel processors like the Core i5-3470 ($199) and Core i5-3570 ($214). Unfortunately, the performance comparisons between those chips don’t favor AMD. The FX-8350 outpaced the i5-3470 in a couple of tests, but overall, we’d still consider the Core i5-3470 the “faster” CPU. The Core i5 is more power friendly too. What the AMD FX-8350 does offer over mainstream Core i5 chips though is an easy upgrade path for existing AMD owners and more flexibility for overclocking, due to its unlocked multipliers.
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The new AMD FX-Series of desktop processor is still a clear step forward for AMD. The FX-8350 we tested offered better performance and improved power efficiency than its predecessor in every test we ran. Forward progress is something that AMD needed and that is what they got with the new FX-Series of desktop processors, even if the amount of forward progress isn’t enough to significantly shift the balance of power in the desktop CPU space. We would have liked to have seen a new chipset accompany this CPU release that would bring things like native USB 3.0 and PCI Express 3.0 support to AMD’s high-end desktop platform, but that’s not in the cards just yet. The former can be added via third-party controllers and the latter offers minimal benefit to end-users at this time. Regardless, it still would have been nice to have feature parity between Intel and AMD in that respect. Compatibility with current platforms does make it easy for existing AMD owners to upgrade their processors, however, which is something we always like to see.
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