It's impressive that AMD has managed to close the performance gap this much in the multi-threading stakes. In Cinebench the AMD chip is only a little over 5 per cent slower, and in X264 there's less than a single per cent difference between them. In fact, if you take the FX-8350's multi-threaded performance in isolation, it's suddenly getting rather close to the performance of the similarly eight-threaded almighty Core i7 3770K. That performance gap gets even bigger when you chuck the HD encoding benchmark of X264 v4.0 at the pair with the FX-8350 getting almost 25 per cent better results than the Intel i5. With the i5 getting around the same sort of figures in Cinebench as the old FX-8150, the new Piledriver chip is a little over 15 per cent quicker. Throw any multi-threaded application at the two rival processors and the AMD chip will soon show its dominance in that arena. And with the resolutely quad-core i5 3570K coming in around £20 more expensive than this eight-thread, quad-module FX-8350, you're going to be getting a substantial chunk more CPU performance straight out of the box. When you consider that the new FX processors are going to be coming out at around the same sort of price as the Bulldozer chips, that's not a bad slice of extra speed. On the multi-threading side though, that slight return isn't as much of an issue thanks to the impressive showing of the original architecture. The multi-threaded performance doesn't see a huge change either - in both segments then we're looking at around 15 per cent extra processing speed. Sadly though, the single-threaded performance hasn't ramped up significantly, so don't get too excited about garnering any extra gaming performance from this new chip. Eight AMD cores running at 4GHz - not too shabby. In fact, this top-end FX chip is hitting the ground running at 4GHz out of the box. That's not to say the new Piledriver design doesn't add any extra performance for your cash. Steamroller doubles up the decode engines in a module, and should make for improved single-threaded performance. That's set to give the individual 'cores' more dedicated hardware to make them more like the traditional core design. There are some other under-the-hood enhancements, but all in all it's relatively low-level stuff.įor the real architectural improvements we're going to have to wait for the arrival of the Steamroller update some time next year. We've seen the first implementation of this new design in the recently released Trinity desktop chips, but this is the first time we've seen it in a dedicated desktop design.Įssentially this isn't a major overhaul - just a few serious engineer-pleasing improvements such as better branch prediction, better hardware prefetching and improved scheduling. To try to amend this, AMD has gone and done a little light restructuring of the Bulldozer modules via this Piledriver update. That also meant gaming performance was down the pecking order, and the competing Intel chips left AMD trailing in their collective wake. In actual use though, this sharing of key components meant that while multi-threaded performance was improved, having so many more threads of processing available meant the single-threaded performance was slower even than the Phenom chips that preceded it. It created Bulldozer modules with a pair of 'cores' in each, sharing some lower utilisation silicon such as level-2 cache, fetch and decode components, while the more vital, time-sensitive parts, such as the integer pipelines and level-1 cache were part of each 'core'. The original Bulldozer design was a pretty radical shift in terms of the change from the Stars architecture found in Phenom. Strap in, I'm going to talk about architecture here.
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