AMD CPU speculation... and expert conjecture

[noob2222]

Yep, oems believe they can control what you want by only offering crap. They feed you crap so they can sell more crap. Oems no longer believe in trying to one-up each other to get your business.

On the flip side, amd and intel rely on oems to buy what they make, in essence controlling 99.9% of their decisions. Then intel and AMD are in turn forced to tell enthusiasts that they are doing the best that they can. Thats what the marketing team does, try to only point out the best side of the situation while hiding the truth.

 

[Reepca]

I don't know why they keep wanting to stick GPU die in CPU's. You have to replace a GPU just about every year or two. They come out with new CPU's every year or two and make us change the motherboard. Or we could buy a new GPU and squeeze out a few more years.

Why the F would I waste 300 dollars on an APU+mobo that will be outdated in 2 years?

Because 99.99% of the computers sold are oem machines for the average home user or business. They don't know or could care less what a "discrete gpu" is. They don't know or care what "fps" is.

That is a very, very depressing portrait of the world.

That's 30k people in the U.S that know what fps stands for or what a discrete gpu is. Wait a minute, how many IT jobs are there in America? That number can't be right!

(Yeah, I get that it's hyperbole)

 

[de5_Roy]

You have it all wrong. The die is huge. That is one of AMD's big problems. They have no room for an L3 cache because the igpu takes up so much real estate on the die. A10-7850K 245 mm2 vs Core i5-4690 177mm² . All you do is read press releases and slides without having a clue how to properly interpret them.

sigh... the apu only seems to have no room because L3$ considerations never made it past design phase. the room went to other stuff.

intel has much less gpu hardware on the desktop i5 die. ypu're comparing GT2 with amd's biggest igpu. by sheer numbers that is 24 EUs (192 shader alus, may be) vs 512 shaders.

amd and intel design dies with different considerations in mind. amd can't afford to design two dies for desktops while intel has at least to dies for desktop alone - the core i3 + GT2, and the i5/i7 +GT2. with haswell, they introduced a 3rd one with -R series with GT3 igpu. meanwhile, amd being the value competitor it is, designs a single mid-size die then harvests and bins apus/cpus from it.

 

[gamerk316]

Again, L3 on the APU wouldn't solve anything because it's memory bottlenecked anyway.

Seriously, using 1/3 of the total CPU area for 10% gains is NOT the way to improve performance.

 

[blackkstar]

I3 might do well in single player with Mantle, but there's no chance it'll keep up with something like 4m/8c Piledriver in a large, multiplayer map in BF4

The models with HTT do. And lower the CPU requirements, and I'd make the leap that the i3 would actually outperform the FX-8xxx series.

Hence why I've been cautioning from the very beginning that the LAST thing AMD want's is lower CPU side requirements, since that allows Intel's i3 to undercut their entire FX lineup. If you can manage to get an i3 to steady frames at medium/high settings, FX gets priced out of the market.

I still have a really difficult time believing you. I play BF4 with Mantle and see constant 6 cores being well loaded, with spikes to 8 (and I do check background processes, there's nothing heavy going on there).

The rendering problem is alleviated but my CPU is clearly not going to be fine with just 4 threads, specially just two logical ones. I don't know how to argue this with you. You are making claims and my own personal experiences show that your claims are not right. But you refuse to listen.

Look at how my rig is overclocked. You are basically saying that Core i3 will be completely on par with a 5ghz FX 6300 series. AMD is behind but it's not that bad.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core-i3-4340-4330-4130_6.html#sect0

The CPUs are in different leagues for multi-thread. If you don't believe me, ask someone else who has two monitors that can constantly watch CPU usage and has an AMD card + AMD CPU and runs Mantle. The game wants more than 4 threads to be happy.

I've got a 30% clockspeed advantage at 5ghz over the fastest Core i3 I can find. If you really don't believe me I'll disable half my compute modules and compare numbers between BF4 with mantle and see if the FPS is the same. But I am very positive you won't see the same performance on a 64 player map. Maybe in single when there's not much going on.

 

[gamerk316]

You're talking about number of threads as if that matters to performance. As I've been saying for half a decade here now, more threads does not necessarily equate to more performance.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/battlefield-4-graphics-card-performance,3634-10.html

Core i3 falling between the 4xxx and 8xxx; shame the 6xxx wasn't tested.

http://www.techspot.com/review/734-battlefield-4-benchmarks/page6.html

Has the i3 = 8xxx, though a GPU bottleneck was likely in play here.

http://techbuyersguru.com/haswellgaming4.php

Has the i3 putting out > 60 FPS at Ultra.

The main issue with the i3 isn't FPS, it's latency. And what issue does DX12 address? Latency. The i3 isn't that much weaker then a FX-6xxx, and DX12 I believe is going to put it over the top.

The reason FX does well in things like Cinibench is because it's an example of an "embarrassingly parallel" problem. It scales to computation resources. A game does NOT, and instead favors stronger cores over more cores. And that's where Intel dominates. In benchmarks, FX is king. For everything else, an i3 is more then a match for the FX-6xxx, and sometimes even the FX-8xxx.

 

[jdwii]

I3 might do well in single player with Mantle, but there's no chance it'll keep up with something like 4m/8c Piledriver in a large, multiplayer map in BF4

The models with HTT do. And lower the CPU requirements, and I'd make the leap that the i3 would actually outperform the FX-8xxx series.

Hence why I've been cautioning from the very beginning that the LAST thing AMD want's is lower CPU side requirements, since that allows Intel's i3 to undercut their entire FX lineup. If you can manage to get an i3 to steady frames at medium/high settings, FX gets priced out of the market.

I still have a really difficult time believing you. I play BF4 with Mantle and see constant 6 cores being well loaded, with spikes to 8 (and I do check background processes, there's nothing heavy going on there).

The rendering problem is alleviated but my CPU is clearly not going to be fine with just 4 threads, specially just two logical ones. I don't know how to argue this with you. You are making claims and my own personal experiences show that your claims are not right. But you refuse to listen.

Look at how my rig is overclocked. You are basically saying that Core i3 will be completely on par with a 5ghz FX 6300 series. AMD is behind but it's not that bad.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core-i3-4340-4330-4130_6.html#sect0

The CPUs are in different leagues for multi-thread. If you don't believe me, ask someone else who has two monitors that can constantly watch CPU usage and has an AMD card + AMD CPU and runs Mantle. The game wants more than 4 threads to be happy.

I've got a 30% clockspeed advantage at 5ghz over the fastest Core i3 I can find. If you really don't believe me I'll disable half my compute modules and compare numbers between BF4 with mantle and see if the FPS is the same. But I am very positive you won't see the same performance on a 64 player map. Maybe in single when there's not much going on.

I remember doing tests with BF4 with the fx 8350 anything over 6 cores performance increases stopped. THe thing to remember is one that is one game not the majority of games two Intel still does it ok in multiplayer with HT and 2 cores not as fast granted but then again in most of my titles the I3 did win. In the future if more games use 6 cores extremely well and one core is not bottleneck more then the other 5(people don't seem to understand how rare this is) then yeah the fx series will win.

Heck even crysis 3 was faster on the I3 over this issue one core on my FX was always using more resources which caused it to lose compared to the haswell I3. It's honestly not as simple as saying the fx is better or i3 its really not black and white.

 

[Embra]

Battlefield 4 Benchmark – Multiplayer CPU and GPU W7 vs W8.1
http://www.hardwarepal.com/battlefield-4-benchmark-mp-cpu-gpu-w7-vs-w8-1/

 

[logainofhades]

Again, L3 on the APU wouldn't solve anything because it's memory bottlenecked anyway.

Seriously, using 1/3 of the total CPU area for 10% gains is NOT the way to improve performance.

Making products that are worse than previous generation isn't either. That is why I have so little faith in AMD, right now. Phenom I sucked against K8. Faildozer was worse than PhII. It is almost like they don't test their own designs, against one another. Intel hasn't had a failure like that since the earlier P4 days, when it was getting stomped by P3. I would rather a new architecture be late, and done right, than releasing something that is worse than your previous arch.

 

[jimmysmitty]

Let us see what happens when a 295X2-esque firepro card comes along shall we?

Not much. Speaking as someone from a company who actually purchases that stuff in bulk, you could discount it to be 1/10 of the cost of NVIDIAs offering, double the performance, and it won't matter one bit because not buying NVIDIA is not an option because the guys with the purse strings have no idea what an AMD is. (Seriously, I've had discussions like this before.) And even if they did consider it, when they find out all those CUDA apps we made won't work, the chances of a purchase go to 0.

THAT'S AMD's problem: NVIDIA cornered the market first. CUDA caught on because people like me like to play with new apps. And now AMD has to convince corporations to dump their software in the toilet and do it all again in order to use their hardware. That's not happening.

As a result, AMD has ZERO chance of ever winning in compute, regardless of cost or performance. Sorry to pop your bubble, but there it is.

So you are saying that a business is unwilling to spend a ton of money to change over to something? No way.....

J/K. Yea that is something people don't remember. I was in Frys Electronics the other day and their customer service PCs have XP on them still. Most likely in a closed network environment but using software that only works on XP (bet I could get it to work on 7). A company will only upgrade when the cost is outweighed by the income due to the upgrades. If they are moving from 15 year old PCs then most likely it is a benefit now. But unless the system is on fire they will continue to use it.

Maybe to you it is not black and white but comparing the price/performance of the two, fx easily wins.

You are right. Price is a point, to a point.

I paid $200 for my i5 2500K. I could have also paid $200 for a Phenom II X4 975BE. Both were $200 in Q1 of 2011. Which one do you think was worth the $200?

I personally think the 2500K was worth it as it is still a good CPU for gaming and general purpose. My wife has a 965BE and while it does ok for what she wants to do, it is more sluggish than my 2500K ever was.

 

[gamerk316]

In the future if more games use 6 cores extremely well and one core is not bottleneck more then the other 5(people don't seem to understand how rare this is) then yeah the fx series will win.

Ah, but AMD has a problem there too. Because it's cores are weaker overall, they are individually easier to bottleneck. So if scaling is subpar, those extra weak cores could INCREASE the chance of a CPU bottleneck.

 

[gamerk316]

J/K. Yea that is something people don't remember. I was in Frys Electronics the other day and their customer service PCs have XP on them still. Most likely in a closed network environment but using software that only works on XP (bet I could get it to work on 7). A company will only upgrade when the cost is outweighed by the income due to the upgrades. If they are moving from 15 year old PCs then most likely it is a benefit now. But unless the system is on fire they will continue to use it.

My company's off-network PCs are gradually being upgraded to Windows 7 PCs running Nahalem based Intel chips, with dedicated (!) ATI (?) HD4000 (0-O) class GPUs.

Just to put things in perspective how often companies upgrade.

 

[palladin9479]

You're talking about number of threads as if that matters to performance. As I've been saying for half a decade here now, more threads does not necessarily equate to more performance.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/battlefield-4-graphics-card-performance,3634-10.html

Core i3 falling between the 4xxx and 8xxx; shame the 6xxx wasn't tested.

http://www.techspot.com/review/734-battlefield-4-benchmarks/page6.html

Has the i3 = 8xxx, though a GPU bottleneck was likely in play here.

http://techbuyersguru.com/haswellgaming4.php

Has the i3 putting out > 60 FPS at Ultra.

The main issue with the i3 isn't FPS, it's latency. And what issue does DX12 address? Latency. The i3 isn't that much weaker then a FX-6xxx, and DX12 I believe is going to put it over the top.

The reason FX does well in things like Cinibench is because it's an example of an "embarrassingly parallel" problem. It scales to computation resources. A game does NOT, and instead favors stronger cores over more cores. And that's where Intel dominates. In benchmarks, FX is king. For everything else, an i3 is more then a match for the FX-6xxx, and sometimes even the FX-8xxx.

Be careful with games like BF4. BF4 campaign is radically different then BF4 MP. On large populated maps, with stuff happening, the game will definitely utilize additional CPU resources to compute the physics and interactions that are taking place, this is done independently of the graphics card because it's assumed that is already busy rendering. BF4:MP is one of the few games that actually utilizes the additional CPU resources provided by FX6/FX8 and the i7. i3's and FX4's start to choke on large maps and i5's can start to hit a limit as well depending on how much is going on at a specific moment.

 

[jdwii]

Maybe to you it is not black and white but comparing the price/performance of the two, fx easily wins.

in every single thing? Yeah go play a emulator or other things that don't use 3+cores(most games from 2013 and before) also try newer games like evil within. Have fun not getting over 35fps with even a 295x.

Its not black and white in those cases above the fx is unplayable even were the I3(4330 130$) at least gives smooth experience in gaming.

 

[jdwii]

BF4 is just one game, even games like crysis 3 is faster i tested over 14 games and all were faster and the ones that had higher fps on my 8350 had stuttering.
The games i tested
Age of empires 3(old to the point still dropped to 25fps in heavy battles with my fx)

BF4(more fps on the fx slightly better overall)

CitiesXl(WAY faster on the I3 uses only 2 cores)

Crysis 3(on my FX one core was used very heavily)

Dolphin emulator(biggest difference out of everything the fx was stuttering like no other I3 played clsoe to perfect)

Dues ex HR(works the same on both, they both have great performance)

Dying light(Faster on I3)

Far cry 4(WAY WAY better on I3 all stuttering went away)

Hitman Absolution(had slightly higher FPS less random drops in FPS)

GTA4(was actually better not even sure how with just 2 cores)
Simcity 5(Again no drops below 32fps before with the fx 8350 i had drops down in the 22fps range with the 1100t it dropped to 18fps in major cities)

Sims 3(heck even that stutters less horrible programming)

Watch dogs(less FPS but no more stuttering)
Far cry 3(also faster)

Evil within would not even go above 35fps its at 50fps now.

So again i tested all these games several times even made videos and its just better for gaming. Most games use 1 core heavily when this happens a 3000000 core FX at 4Ghz based on piledriver will stutter. When games like Battlefield 4 use all cores well without one being stressed more then the other ones the FX will do better.

Sure at the end of the day its the engines fault but why buy hardware that offers inconsistent performance in games just to complain its the software guys fault?

 

[jimmysmitty]

Let us see what happens when a 295X2-esque firepro card comes along shall we?

Not much. Speaking as someone from a company who actually purchases that stuff in bulk, you could discount it to be 1/10 of the cost of NVIDIAs offering, double the performance, and it won't matter one bit because not buying NVIDIA is not an option because the guys with the purse strings have no idea what an AMD is. (Seriously, I've had discussions like this before.) And even if they did consider it, when they find out all those CUDA apps we made won't work, the chances of a purchase go to 0.

THAT'S AMD's problem: NVIDIA cornered the market first. CUDA caught on because people like me like to play with new apps. And now AMD has to convince corporations to dump their software in the toilet and do it all again in order to use their hardware. That's not happening.

As a result, AMD has ZERO chance of ever winning in compute, regardless of cost or performance. Sorry to pop your bubble, but there it is.

So you are saying that a business is unwilling to spend a ton of money to change over to something? No way.....

J/K. Yea that is something people don't remember. I was in Frys Electronics the other day and their customer service PCs have XP on them still. Most likely in a closed network environment but using software that only works on XP (bet I could get it to work on 7). A company will only upgrade when the cost is outweighed by the income due to the upgrades. If they are moving from 15 year old PCs then most likely it is a benefit now. But unless the system is on fire they will continue to use it.

Maybe to you it is not black and white but comparing the price/performance of the two, fx easily wins.

You are right. Price is a point, to a point.

I paid $200 for my i5 2500K. I could have also paid $200 for a Phenom II X4 975BE. Both were $200 in Q1 of 2011. Which one do you think was worth the $200?

I personally think the 2500K was worth it as it is still a good CPU for gaming and general purpose. My wife has a 965BE and while it does ok for what she wants to do, it is more sluggish than my 2500K ever was.

2500k vs 975 be the 2500 wins easily. there performance was never comparable only price, it is reversed with the i3-fx6 there performance is similar but not the price.

My point was that AMD is not always better price/performance. I am sure that people who bought the original FX series felt that way when they spent $1000 for that CPU and mid end Core 2 Duos shortly after were beating it for half the price or less.

As for the i3 vs FX 6300, the i3 4330 is $129 while the FX 6300 is $109. $20 dollar difference and they perform mostly the same in most cases.

J/K. Yea that is something people don't remember. I was in Frys Electronics the other day and their customer service PCs have XP on them still. Most likely in a closed network environment but using software that only works on XP (bet I could get it to work on 7). A company will only upgrade when the cost is outweighed by the income due to the upgrades. If they are moving from 15 year old PCs then most likely it is a benefit now. But unless the system is on fire they will continue to use it.

My company's off-network PCs are gradually being upgraded to Windows 7 PCs running Nahalem based Intel chips, with dedicated (!) ATI (?) HD4000 (0-O) class GPUs.

Just to put things in perspective how often companies upgrade.

That sounds familiar. I have worked for companies that had a phone system that was so old that the box that ran the software was a Pentium III Coppermine based system with Windows 2K on it.

 

[bmacsys]

I don't know why they keep wanting to stick GPU die in CPU's. You have to replace a GPU just about every year or two. They come out with new CPU's every year or two and make us change the motherboard. Or we could buy a new GPU and squeeze out a few more years.

Why the F would I waste 300 dollars on an APU+mobo that will be outdated in 2 years?

Because 99.99% of the computers sold are oem machines for the average home user or business. They don't know or could care less what a "discrete gpu" is. They don't know or care what "fps" is.

That is a very, very depressing portrait of the world.

That's 30k people in the U.S that know what fps stands for or what a discrete gpu is. Wait a minute, how many IT jobs are there in America? That number can't be right!

(Yeah, I get that it's hyperbole)

I know it sucks. But Dell or HP probably sell in an hour more pc's than enthusiast buy in 5 years time. Literally.

 

[Reepca]

http://us.hardware.info/reviews/5766/amd-fx-6300-vs-intel-core-i3-4330-budget-gaming-cpu-deathmatch

If the results are to be trusted, and the i3 is $20 more expensive... it seems like the fx-6300 is certainly competitive with the i3. Most people who are really serious about gaming will get an i5, and most entry-level gamers (by most people's standards, not mine... my standards have entry-level gaming using an a10-5800k on a 720p screen) would go with an fx-6300. I can't really see a place for the i3 at that price, except in games that are old enough to utilize only one or two cores but somehow still demanding enough to cause a CPU bottleneck.

 

[logainofhades]

If you never intend to upgrade your CPU, FX 6300 is an ok choice. If you want to seriously overclock it though, you may as well just go with an i3 or i5, as the price difference is quickly negated, once you factor that in. Not to mention the fact, that the stock cooler, for the FX 6300 is pathetic. If AMD would have used the stock cooling for the FX 6350 and FX 83xx chips, it would have been a killer deal. That cooler is adequate for an FX 6300, even clocked to 4.0ghz, or so. The all aluminum heatsink is only useful as a paperweight.

 

[jdwii]

jdwill did you just use a obscure definition of gaming as evidence. The I3 is very comparable to a fx 6 across the board in games, win some lose some, but comparable and in games not needing the extra extra cores one could drop down to a high clocked fx4 as can intel with the unlocked g.

The I3 is overpriced, add the fx6 overclocking capability and it becomes black and white

Really i look into it as power consumption and a quiet cooler(stock cooler) makes it black and white. Again this whole thing depends on the games you play and the software you use. I had the fx at 4.3Ghz the highest i could get it with a 212+ cooler and it still lost to a 3.7ghz dual core Intel CPU in those games and some are old and some are new. Enough said. Even at 5.0ghz the 9000 series fx loses in those same games i mentioned at least the single threaded ones.

Intel is 45% ahead of Amd in terms of performance per clock its not like they are only 20% better. In pure gaming i'd rather have a i3 over a 8 core fx at this current time(upgrading to a I7 anyways in march-june).

Then when we through in the fact a I3 uses very little power consumption and even a 45-60$ board is enough to run it fine and you still get USB 3.0 and PCE-3.0 or in other terms a modern chipset that is upgradable to a real CPU. When looking at the fx 6300 many were complaining about VRM issues on cheaper boards a issue that doesn't even matter when most of the power delivery is done on the haswell core itself instead of the board. Actually i sold my sabertooth and 8350 for 250$ and grabbed my I3 and board and had enough to go out to eat(at a cheap place) when i got it i expected to lose performance in most cases but the opposite happen. I think the I3 gets a bad rap over ignorance since its only 2 cores and that's all people look at and they get fooled into thinking moar cores is ALWAYS better(sure isn't over benchmarks).

 

[jdwii]

If you never intend to upgrade your CPU, FX 6300 is an ok choice. If you want to seriously overclock it though, you may as well just go with an i3 or i5, as the price difference is quickly negated, once you factor that in. Not to mention the fact, that the stock cooler, for the FX 6300 is pathetic. If AMD would have used the stock cooling for the FX 6350 and FX 83xx chips, it would have been a killer deal. That cooler is adequate for an FX 6300, even clocked to 4.0ghz, or so. The all aluminum heatsink is only useful as a paperweight.

I remember my stock cooler on my 8350 had it on for just a week to see how it was sounded like a hand vacuum cleaner was in my case. edit and yeah as stated the I3 thing was always a thing to tie me other i was even going to get the unlocked pentium just for fun and then a I7 4790K my days of overclocking are coming to an end.

 

[logainofhades]

Yea, I really want a mini-itx setup, but more and more, I think I am going to have to wait till Skylake. Hoping Intel produces a Xeon equivalent i7, similar to the 1231v3. I do not want to pay the high price for i7, nor do I really want to overclock. Only thing that would change my mind is an insane Microcenter deal, that made getting a K series worth it.

 

[Embra]

I really feel the performance of the FX cpus are understated. Sure they are a bit slower in benchmarks for many games etc ... My 8320 works great for every game i play. If anything, I think it's getting better with newer games. I just don't think most people will not notice a few fps in some games. Games are so much more GPU bond.

Gamers in general buy more than what they really need, whether it is bragging rights or they they want those extra frames. All that is fine, but I see many people getting talked into components they do not really need. I think we all tend to talk in extremes about some of the differences between Intel, AMD and Nvidia for most uses. I used to be one of those that would upgrade every year, until I realized I didn't need to.

 

[logainofhades]

I am almost on my 3rd year, of my 3570k. That is unheard of, for me. The GPU has been changed, or upgraded, a couple times. My HD 5850's, in CF, were leftovers from a previous system. Replaced them with an HD 7970. It started giving me troubles, so I bought my GTX 770, off of a friend of mine, from another forum.

 

[jdwii]

I really feel the performance of the FX cpus are understated. Sure they are a bit slower in benchmarks for many games etc ... My 8320 works great for every game i play. If anything, I think it's getting better with newer games. I just don't think most people will not notice a few fps in some games. Games are so much more GPU bond.

Gamers in general buy more than what they really need, whether it is bragging rights or they they want those extra frames. All that is fine, but I see many people getting talked into components they do not really need. I think we all tend to talk in extremes about some of the differences between Intel, AMD and Nvidia for most uses. I used to be one of those that would upgrade every year, until I realized I didn't need to.

True its certainly not needed and my brother today even told me he couldn't tell the difference between 30fps and 60fps i was like WHAT. In most games even my 1100T worked fine. Its just when i ran into a few games like Simcity that drove me nuts or tried playing dolphin emulator what made me lose it a bit with my FX CPU is evil within my 770 was only at 60% usage or so and far cry 4 was at 80% usage like what's the point in even having such a video card if i can't even feed it.

A lot play BF4 and my 1100T did a great job in that game.
Actually if a person is still running a I7 920 and a 5870 i think all games today are probably still playable somewhat.

The companies want us to think otherwise, try and convince us we need to upgrade every single year or something. When in reality its not needed. Directx 12 and Opengl next will really help things out for people with lower-end CPU's.