The five best AMD CPUs of all time: From old-school Athlon to brand-new Ryzen

[g-unit1111]

I just upgraded from my 5800X to a 7800X3D (motherboard finally died) and I have to say this is an excellent CPU, and it's definitely worth all of the hype.

The Ryzen 5000 series is great too and should definitely get some credit.

 

[MyXPC]

Previous was a 4800X2 but 3950X brought me many cores on Linux.
Just wished 3950X could be tuned like 5950X which came on market right after.

 

[systemBuilder_49]

As a recent 5950x buyer (used), i think it deserves mention for its extremely low power consumption and incredibly high mips per watt. It's definitely bringing massive parallelism (32 threads) to the masses at an affordable price, i think it was the first 16-core part to drop below $500 msrp or something like that!

I upgraded from a 5700g which is arguably the first mainstream 60fps 1080p desktop GPU/iGPU. I think that this chip or one of its brethren was also an important milestone since i looked for such a chip from 2013 to 2021 ...

 

[Avro Arrow]

The R7-1700 was my first Ryzen CPU and fourth AMD CPU. It was simple numbers for me with my Phenom II X4 940, 965 and FX-8350. The performance that they provided was more than enough for me and the prices were dirt cheap compared to what Chipzilla wanted for their parts.

My FX-8350 cost me all of $170CAD (~$125USD) and lasted me from 2012 to 2017, playing every game that I wanted it to. That's a far cry from the $400CAD for an Intel i7-3770K. I already had the motherboard and RAM because I was anticipating getting an FX-8150. Of course, that CPU turned out to be a real turkey and I just grabbed a Phenom II X4 965 instead so that I could actually use the 990FX motherboard and 16GB of RAM that I had already purchased.

In the end, the amount I paid for the Phenom II X4 965, Gigabyte 990FX motherboard, 16GB of DDR3-1333 and FX-8350 was about the same amount I would've paid for an i7-3770K alone. My mother's HTPC is currently running W10 Pro on that same twelve year-old FX-8350 that I got for so cheap.

No matter what shade people throw at the FX-8350, I will never regret that purchase. 😉👍

 

[Pemalite]

The model names of Athlon XP CPUs were based on how closely they performed to competing Intel models, with 1800+ meaning it was about equivalent to a 1.8 GHz Pentium 4.

This is blatantly false.

The PR rating was a performance comparison against AMD's Thunderbird core, not the Pentium 4.
People compared it against the Pentium 4, because that was what the competition was.

And if we look at a previous sentence in the article... You even state the 1800+ was able to beat a 2ghz Pentium 4 meaning, it wasn't equivalent anyway.

 

[utroz]

My most memorable Amd cpu was a Barton XP-M 2500+ @2.4Ghz rock stable for 6+ years. It could even do cpuz screen shots at 2.6Ghz when i opened the window during a -30F night one winter.. I also had a Semprom 2600+ Palermo @ 2.4Ghz (still runs till this day). Those days you could but a low end cpu and overclock to as fast if not faster than the most expensive cpu in just a couple bios settings and a decent cooler.

 

[stonecarver]

It might not be the best or a great one but when I built a AMD Xp 3000 + CPU that old CPU was a power house.

I feel It would have lasted longer than it's short life as AMD 64 bit kicked the Xp 3000+ to the curb upgrade wise. Dead platform.

The funniest thing was Windows yes put out Longhorn AKA Windows Xp 64 bit but the upgraded 64 bit PC's I built never even seen anything but 32 bit OS in there full runs.

The biggest motivation that moved me to AMD 64 was be stuck with older memory and AGP port vs PCI-E not really anything to do with 64 bit.

I ran AMD's for about 15 years and went Xeon's a couple of years just before Ryzen release. I have worked on many Ryzen machines just never owned one of there newer hot rod yet.

Ones I have owned,
Duron 1800 I think need to look at CPU.
Xp1800+
Xp2600+
Xp2700+
Xp3000+ 333 FSB
Xp3200+ 333 FSB
Xp3200+ 400 FSB

64Bit CPU's

3400+
3700+
3800+
I kind of have a memory of 3500+ that was short live as it sucked.
FX4300+
6000+
And I few more that memory is forgetting but that first Xp 3000+ is the one that left the best impression.

All the rest just seemed in hindsight were large rebuilds hoping I would get faster, better computer but in the end was always disappointed. Not so much in the speed and performance of the computer but I never got the feeling of going from a Toyota Corolla to a Lexus.

 

[Cooe]

I completely agree with the specific CPU's listed but there is absolutely no way in freaking HELL that Zen 2 should be ahead of K8/Athlon 64!!!

Athlon 64 and the fully backwards compatible "AMD64" 64-bit ISA extension it brought to x86 along with it is arguably the single most important x86 CPU of all time after the OG 16-bit 8086 & 32-bit 386, (yes, even beating out the original Pentium), AND was what secured AMD's permanent access to their x86 license! (As Intel had to cross license OG x86 to AMD to get a license for AMD64 after the Itanic crashed and burned in such glorious fashion.)

Zen 2 was insanely important, sure, but not THAT important. 🤷

 

[TheGiantRat]

Why in the world would the Amd athlon thoroughbred not be on this list?

If there was no thoroughbred, none of the rest of these would have happened. The K6 was awful and the athlon absolutely dismantles the P3 and was still competitive with p4 depending on the benchmarks.

The K5 was very good, beating the Pentium. The K6 was mediocre but the K6-2 was actually faster than Pentium in general x86 tasks. It was only a bit slower in GPU tasks. K6-2 had 3DNow! instruction set to accelerate CPU tasks. 3DNow! was even faster than Intel SSE instruction set found in Pentium III, but Intel bribed developers to not implement AMD 3DNow! and stick to only MMX and SSE. So overall, AMD K6-2 and III were overall faster than Pentium II and Pentium III Katmai (or Pentium II.5) but lacking of software support made them slower in public eyes.