Report: AMD CPU Price Drops Incoming; New FX-CPUs

[N.Broekhuijsen]

AMD might be dropping some of its CPU prices in a couple of weeks, which is unarguably a good thing.

Report: AMD CPU Price Drops Incoming; New FX-CPUs : Read more

 

[Shneiky]

And here I was excited about Steamroller FX. Nope. Nothing new. Still the same Piledriver fiasco.

 

[tridon]

The 8370E is actually looking like a somewhat relevant cpu. Well... not for everyone of course, but I would reckon the lower tdp will make it more competitive than the 8350 is.

 

[ssdpro]

What is so fiasco about piledriver? I run a Z87 w/4770K system and a 990FX w/8350 system - while the AMD system can't compare with the processing power of the Intel, it isn't a disgrace or anything. If anything I think the AMD system is a bit more predicable and stable at the expense of everything, excluding PCIe, being about 20 percent slower.

 

[Kieran Warren]

Sadly AMD are struggling to compete in the high end CPU market these days. This can cause huge problems. Without any competition Intel would be able to raise their prices without a large performance boost meaning we get worse value for money. However they seem to be competing just fine in the lower-mid range CPUs and provide great bang for buck in almost all graphics card ranges.

 

[de5_Roy]

that's good news. both fx6350 and fx6300 will sell at very attractive prices. fx4320 looks like a bad buy compared to them. for a bit more budget, fx8320 also looks good considering intel only sells dual cores (core i3) desktop processors under the $170 range.

 

[icemunk]

AMD should just go full retard on the FX series.. just like put out a 8GHZ 500Watt TDP stock-liquid cooled chip with 16 cores or something completely nuts. Then on the other end they can focus on efficiency on their FM2 cores, and push for smaller form factors.

 

[photonboy]

AMD is dying a slow death.
The company keeps getting bailed out, but they just don't have the engineering and liquid assets to ensure their future.

Intel's squeezed them out of the high-end. Now Intel's efforts on mobile efficiency of the x86 CPU's is going to squeeze AMD out of the low end.

NVidia's got a lot of things going on as well to diversify.

I'd love AMD to do well however I'm not seeing a lot of hope for ten years down the road.

 

[Shneiky]

Seeing how Steamroller performs in their APUs, creating a 3/4 module Piledriver FX on at least 20 nm (too bad it is not possible now), would let AMD at least come back into the heavy Integer performance and post some nice numbers along with few watts reduced TPD. The 7800/7850K's CPU performance is almost on par with a low-end I3 and it trades blows and even slightly edging the FX4300, despite it being 100 MHz clocked higher and having 125W TPD for CPU only.

AMD has horrible floating point performance, so I am hoping they can at least bite the integer performance, sell some, gain some money, do some more R&D, get a new product out, so they can keep Intel prices from skyrocketing.

 

[childofthekorn]

The reviews for the A10-7800 being more power efficient compared to the 7850k and then this coming out makes me curious, what is different about this chip that its capped at 95w.

Although significant, but not a game changer, IMO.

 

[silverblue]

I'm not sure about the 125W 8370, unless the higher TDP means it can be overclocked better. Should AMD have created a higher clocked 8350 at 30% lower power consumption, that's not bad going considering.

I'd still rather have Steamroller cores at those clock speeds, mind...

 

[TechyInAZ]

I believe this will boost AMD's sales, since an AMD FX that performs equally with an i7 in threaded apps for only $130 is a good deal.

 

[Chris Droste]

My question really is what's holding AMD back from the dedicated CPU updates? we know they have and have implimented and have next-gen Kaverni/Steamroller architecture, we know they can pare down to more efficient power consumption, is it just that they don't have the resources to push the fabrication down to 22nm? or are they just letting themselves stagnate until 14nm(16nm?) is feasible and skip a die shrink step? Even if they're not fighting i7s with their 8-series FX you'd think they'd still keep pushing out something in AM3+ guise to keep the money flowing. I haven't even heard of stepping improvements that you typically get with chips as they mature, usually giving people less power leakage/OC improvements. is there some sort of engineering powerstruggle arguing internally about how the Phenom2 architecture seemed to have better IPC or what? i mean, SERIOUSLY. no CPU releases = no new product = no new product interest = no new sales. the 8350's a fine chip and a great buy for $160 especially if you already have an older board...but most people on the AM3 platform probably already went to a 6350 or 8350 like LAST YEAR already. and those people aren't going to be shopping FM2 platforms anytime soon to replace their main rig. I know AMD isn't exactly cash-healthy but stagnation isn't going to help.

 

[gear999]

If AMD sold true eight core CPUs (none of that confusing module/floating point stuff) that was manufactured with 22nm which would cost $180 minimum (FX 8520?) and $230 maximum (FX 8550/8570?) which had enough power per watt to rival Intel, they could really get going again.

 

[DJready]

Why they don't just make a better single core performance cpu's instead of just filling the gaps with higher ghz.

 

[childofthekorn]

My question really is what's holding AMD back from the dedicated CPU updates? we know they have and have implimented and have next-gen Kaverni/Steamroller architecture, we know they can pare down to more efficient power consumption, is it just that they don't have the resources to push the fabrication down to 22nm? or are they just letting themselves stagnate until 14nm(16nm?) is feasible and skip a die shrink step? Even if they're not fighting i7s with their 8-series FX you'd think they'd still keep pushing out something in AM3+ guise to keep the money flowing. I haven't even heard of stepping improvements that you typically get with chips as they mature, usually giving people less power leakage/OC improvements. is there some sort of engineering powerstruggle arguing internally about how the Phenom2 architecture seemed to have better IPC or what? i mean, SERIOUSLY. no CPU releases = no new product = no new product interest = no new sales. the 8350's a fine chip and a great buy for $160 especially if you already have an older board...but most people on the AM3 platform probably already went to a 6350 or 8350 like LAST YEAR already. and those people aren't going to be shopping FM2 platforms anytime soon to replace their main rig. I know AMD isn't exactly cash-healthy but stagnation isn't going to help.

Even if you (and i for that matter) like the 8350, they aren't going to produce more bulldozer chips if they aren't selling. Rumors are that Steamroller am3+ next year at 20nm. I'd prefer they hold off until excavator personally and just focus on making the chip more efficient.

They're good for day to day use, but the thermal envelope being as high as it is, the inefficiency per clock and high IPC as well as large power draw keeps as many from being sold. Once they get this crap worked out they'll cmoe out wtih a new desktop processor thats competitive. Jim Keller (the engineer who helped AMD pull intels reigns with the release of Athlon x64) is back and working on something brand new, I'm looking forward to seeing if its a competitive option or not.

 

[dextermat]

The problem with Amd and Intel is their are too many cpu we don't need....

As an example : "The new CPUs in question are the FX-8370, FX-8370E and FX-8320E. base frequency of 4.1 GHz, with a Boost frequency of 4.3 GHz"
How much of a difference does .2 GHz really does (usually we see a bigger gap between the base and boost (at least .5 GHz)

While I think the real deal is mostly the wattage (95 and 125)
But bottom line, when I buy a cpu, I just want it to work efficiently.

 

[salgado18]

My question really is what's holding AMD back from the dedicated CPU updates? we know they have and have implimented and have next-gen Kaverni/Steamroller architecture, we know they can pare down to more efficient power consumption, is it just that they don't have the resources to push the fabrication down to 22nm? or are they just letting themselves stagnate until 14nm(16nm?) is feasible and skip a die shrink step? Even if they're not fighting i7s with their 8-series FX you'd think they'd still keep pushing out something in AM3+ guise to keep the money flowing. I haven't even heard of stepping improvements that you typically get with chips as they mature, usually giving people less power leakage/OC improvements. is there some sort of engineering powerstruggle arguing internally about how the Phenom2 architecture seemed to have better IPC or what? i mean, SERIOUSLY. no CPU releases = no new product = no new product interest = no new sales. the 8350's a fine chip and a great buy for $160 especially if you already have an older board...but most people on the AM3 platform probably already went to a 6350 or 8350 like LAST YEAR already. and those people aren't going to be shopping FM2 platforms anytime soon to replace their main rig. I know AMD isn't exactly cash-healthy but stagnation isn't going to help.

I'm on a 8120, and loving it, but power consumption is too much for my taste, especially overclocking (constant 4 GHz keeps all games fluid), so I disabled half of it to have an FX 4100. I thought about getting an 8320 for the efficiency improvement, but that would be too little improvement to make the expense worth it.

But now there's an 8320 at 95W stock! That is tempting, and if money allows, I might buy one. Not many people will be interested in these new processors, but there's a market for them. Steamroller would be better, but we do with what we have. :/

 

[Gaidax]

So basically they took their stock of ancient CPU's, bumped the clock by 100Mhz and changed the sticker to attract more suc... I mean customers.

 

[salgado18]

If AMD sold true eight core CPUs (none of that confusing module/floating point stuff) that was manufactured with 22nm which would cost $180 minimum (FX 8520?) and $230 maximum (FX 8550/8570?) which had enough power per watt to rival Intel, they could really get going again.

That's obvious, but they can't just put more floating point and halve the power because yes, can they?

 

[silverblue]

If AMD sold true eight core CPUs (none of that confusing module/floating point stuff) that was manufactured with 22nm which would cost $180 minimum (FX 8520?) and $230 maximum (FX 8550/8570?) which had enough power per watt to rival Intel, they could really get going again.

Such a CPU would bankrupt them at that price. A return to a more traditional core setup may make more sense but you'd be talking four cores at the most.

There are many problems with Piledriver, but on the whole it's nowhere near as bad as Bulldozer. Slow cache, modular power gating and a lack of floating point resources still don't change the fact that the architecture still generally improves upon Phenom II for the same amount of power - my PII X3 710 is rated at 95W for a triple-core 2.6GHz CPU whereas a 6300 is clocked nearly 1GHz higher, has double the cores and still uses less power. Intel just improved their power usage at a much faster rate (and AMD clocks its parts too highly to help them keep up, at the risk of increasing power consumption far too much).

 

[Chris Droste]

my HTPC is on an FX-4100 with an older AM3 board so if Asus releases a BIOS update to support it an 8370E seems like a pretty nice deal but at this stage I'm not particularly interested in upgrading it since it does it's job extremely well and isn't hurting to perform any of it's primary functions (driving a 58" 1080p 240Hz screen, netflix and hulu, light online gaming/MMO) so again, really...AMD needs something to build some press and excitement. do we know if one of their Radeon GPUs can be re-purposed into a CPU role and improve on their IPC? Sometimes it seems like a older Tahiti chip needs a CPU (amd OR intel) less than the CPU needs it.

 

[yay]

It must be nice to have a personal mint for r&d being Intel.

Don't get me wrong, they do a lot for open source and various other projects that don't directly make them money, but even open source is a massive value add for their main sources of income, they are a business.

They however didn't pay nearly what it was worth for cheating on the horrible p4 stage. When you take into account all the future sales they would cost AMD in the long term they basically paid nothing.

 

[masmotors]

good news but i hope a die shrink is next and soon

 

[CooLWoLF]

That 8370E looks very tempting. The 8350 already clocks up very well. Imagine the extra overclocking room with the lower TDP. This could be very interesting for enthusiasts.