AMD FX-8350 Octa-Core 4GHz question

[g.h.hristov9]

so i bought AMD FX-8350 Octa-Core 4GHz and its a 8-core cpu but when i open the task manager in win10 its says
cores:4
logical processors:8
shouldn't it be cores:8?
is this a problem?
and how can i fix?

 

[rgd1101]

it is 8 logical. it is fine.

 

[TJ Hooker]

I don't think there's an issue. Older AMD chips use a somewhat unique architecture, where the CPU cores are divided into "clusters", with two cores per cluster. However, some CPU resources are shared between both cores in a cluster. Because of this, an 8 core FX chip is sometimes described as a 4 core/8 thread CPU. There was quite a bit of debate about what constitutes a "core" and whether the FX 8xxx chips were really octo core CPUs; there was even a lawsuit about it IIRC, don't know how it turned out or if it's still ongoing.

As an aside, I hope you got that chip for pretty cheap and already had an AM3+ mobo and DDR3 RAM. Otherwise, buying an FX chip in 2018 is a pretty bad choice.

 

[DSzymborski]

so i bought AMD FX-8350 Octa-Core 4GHz and its a 8-core cpu but when i open the task manager in win10 its says
cores:4
logical processors:8
shouldn't it be cores:8?
is this a problem?
and how can i fix?

No, this is absolutely accurate. An FX-8350 doesn't have eight truly independent cores, but four independent that share resources among two cores. It's *closer* to a true eight-core than the old i7 four-core, eight-thread CPUs (though each core much, much slower), but it's not truly eight independent cores. So you'll sometimes get different software identifying these chips differently. This is typically how Windows indentifies the FX-8350.

 

[photonboy]

Yep. above all correct.

*as long as TASK MANAGER for Performance->CPU (with show logical cores selected) shows EIGHT GRAPHS you are fine.

Just FYI:

FX-8350 - this is four "MODULES" which as said have two "cores" per module. Not quite two separate cores so sharing causes issues with performance (the logic being less transistors and cheaper overall but code didn't really utilize them well).

i7-4790K - this has four cores, but is hyperthreaded. In this case a 2nd thread of code sits in a buffer to start being processed during the wait times the 1st thread of code isn't running (waiting for new data)… so it's still just one physical core that toggles between two threads of code

Both of these show up as "eight threads" in Task Manager but are physically quite different. The HYPERTHREADING method has won out and its what AMD RYZEN now uses in all but the low-end CPU's (they call it SMT).

 

[g.h.hristov9]

Ok thank you