General Use Performance

We'll start out our tests with the 7-zip benchmark, a CPU bound multithreaded integer workload that looks at 7-zip compression/decompression algorithms where the IO subsystem is removed from the equation:

7-zip Benchmark

7-zip is almost the perfect scenario for AMD's Vishera: a heavily threaded integer benchmark. Here the FX-8350 is able to outperform the Core i7 3770K. In fact, all of the Vishera parts are able to outperform their price competitive Ivy Bridge alternatives. The old Core i7 920 does pretty well here thanks to its 8-thread architecture.

Next up is Mozilla's Kraken JavaScript benchmark. This test includes some forward looking js code designed to showcase performance of future rich web applications on today's software and hardware. We run the test under IE10:

Windows 8 - Mozilla Kraken Javascript Benchmark

If the 7-zip benchmark is the best case scenario for AMD, Mozilla's Kraken test is among the worst. Largely dominated by single threaded performance, the FX-8350 is significantly slower than a Core i3 3220. Only Intel's old Core i7 920 is slower here, and that's a chip that debuted in 2008.

Although not the best indication of overall system performance, the SYSMark 2012 suite does give us a good idea of lighter workloads than we're used to testing.

SYSMark 2012 - Overall

Overall performance according to SYSMark 2012 is within striking distance of Ivy Bridge, at least for the FX-8350. AMD seems to have equalled the performance of last year's 2500K, and is able to deliver almost 90% of the performance of the 3750K. It's not a win by any means, but AMD is inching closer.

SYSMark 2012 - Office Productivity

SYSMark 2012 - Media Creation

SYSMark 2012 - Web Development

SYSMark 2012 - Data/Financial Analysis

SYSMark 2012 - 3D Modeling

SYSMark 2012 - System Management

Par2 File Recovery Performance

Par2 is an application used for reconstructing downloaded archives. It can generate parity data from a given archive and later use it to recover the archive

Chuchusoft took the source code of par2cmdline 0.4 and parallelized it using Intel’s Threading Building Blocks 2.1. The result is a version of par2cmdline that can spawn multiple threads to repair par2 archives. For this test we took a 708MB archive, corrupted nearly 60MB of it, and used the multithreaded par2cmdline to recover it. The scores reported are the repair and recover time in seconds.

Par2 - Multi-Threaded par2cmdline 0.4

Crank up the threads and once again you see Vishera do quite well. The FX-8350 outpaces the Core i5 3570, and the FX-4300 falls only slightly behind the Core i3 3220.

Excel Math Performance

Microsoft Excel 2007 SP1 - Monte Carlo Simulation

Introduction Video Transcoding & Visual Studio 2012 Performance
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  • CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, October 30, 2012 - link

    So did you buy the i5 3470, or the FX 6200 ?

    According to you and your 1st chart, that's what "most of us bought". Okay, since we know that's total BS, what you said is also total BS.

    " because most of us will buy the most performant processor per dollar "

    LOL - okay, so there's a big problem bub - OC the 2500K and it skyrockets off the top of your 1st chart straight up.

    So, did you buy the 2500K, like "most of us did" if we "used your declared knowledge about us all" and added 2 watts of common sense into the mix ?

    Why must you people torture us so ?
  • Idiot10 - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    Hey Mr. ChariseHogburn, why don't yoy take your 2500K with you and leave us all to our musings? You seem to know everything about processors why don't you let others do what they want to do? You big piece of Intel mercenary shit! SOB!!!!
  • Mathos - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link

    It does give a reason and an upgrade path to finally move up from my aging P2 1090T. One of the main workloads I do when I use my PC heavily is indeed easy h.264 encoding for game and other types of video. Always nice to be able to knock a video file down from 2.5GB to 200-500MB. I've personally always used MSI or ASRock boards myself, with some Asus boards when I can catch the price right, in reply to the board used for the benchmarks.

    I noticed there are overclocking numbers that do look decent. Some things I'm curious about. How do they take to undervolting? My luck with previous AMD generations has been pretty good when it came to that. At least when I felt like tinkering. Use to be able to run the old 9600be and 9850be considerably lower than stock voltages for example, at stock speeds, and some times even with mild overclocks on the NB's. I've noticed with that AMD tends to be fairly conservative.

    And since they appear to still be using the same IMC/L3 speed linked to the north bridge hyper transport speed. How does upping the actual speed of the NB IMC/L3 effect the performance and stability of the platform. I know back in the day of the 9600be/9850be I could generally get them close to the same performance level as a core2 quad at the same clock speeds through that kind of tweaking.

    And on a final note, it's a nice performance increase overall, even in single threaded apps, over the bulldozer cores. But you'd think they would of implemented a way to gang the integer cores and make them act as a single core for single threaded performance. That's all it would really take the pick up a bit of the slack I think.
  • jensend - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link

    Why the heck are you starting your power consumption charts at 50W rather than at zero?

    That's *extremely* misleading, wildly exaggerating AMD's disadvantage. AMD has roughly 2x the power consumption of IVB at load and 1.25x the power consumption at idle- but by starting your chart at 50W you're exaggerating that into over 3x at load *and at idle*.

    *Please* get yourself a copy of "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" and read the section talking about the "lie factor" of a graph or chart.
  • Spunjji - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link

    I think they are anticipating their readership noticing that the graph starts at 50W, just as you did.
  • kevith - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link

    They probably do. But that´s not the point. A GRAPH is meant to show a string of figures as a drawing.

    When a graph starts at anything but zero, it will not show a true picture.

    With two pieces of something to compare, where both lay in the area between say 90 and 91 of some kind of value..

    If you then make a graph, thats going from 89-92 in 1/10´s, you wil get a graph, that shows a very uneven curve, going up and down all the time, with seemingly big differences in values.

    But if it started at zero, like it´s supposed to, you would see a almost straight line, reflecting the true picture: These two things are practically alike in this specific area.

    IF you don´t make a graph like that ALL THE TIME, there´s no need to make a graph at all, you could just write the values as figures.
  • CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, October 30, 2012 - link

    No spooge, it's called amd fanboy advantage, that is what should be always anticipated, and is actually always provided.
  • Pythias - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link

    Why was the i3 dropped from some of the charts?
  • CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, October 30, 2012 - link

    Because it kicked so much amd pileofcrap.
  • redwarrior - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link

    Anands testing was the usual lazy-designed testing with poor planning. Why run sysmark, that every one knows uses testing methods that tend to ignore multi-threading.. Keep the test on applications only and make sure your gaming apps are representative. I saw better testing done on several other websites where the usually poorly designed and coded trash was balanced with other games that did employ some level of multi-threading The FX-8350 did immensely better in that gaming selection. Mostl gamers are not shoot-em-up fascist gamers. There is no reason for Anand to stack the game selctions in the single-threaded direction only. I beleive Anand is a shill for Intel and chose the stupid sysmark tests and the game sin such a fashion to downplay the vast performance improvments that are possible from the FX-8350 cpu. That is one reason I do NOT spend much time on this site any more.
    There is nothing I detest more than intellectual dishionesty. Check out Tom's hardware their review was done more scientifically and had a balanced selection of tests. The Vishera FX-8350clearly bested the I5 3570 in most tests and was the best performance for the buck by far. A better objectively designed test. No axes to grind. To hell with Anand, unofficial Intel shill and LAZY intellectually.

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