The Vishera Review: AMD FX-8350, FX-8320, FX-6300 and FX-4300 Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 23, 2012 12:00 AM ESTProjected Performance: Can AMD Catch up with Intel?
I keep going back to this slide because it's incredibly relevant. It's the only indication we have from AMD of what its future roadmap will look like in terms of performance increases:
Each year AMD promised to increase performance of its high-end cores by roughly 10 - 15%. Astute observers will note that, at this rate, AMD will almost never catch up to Intel. AMD at the time was careful to point out that it's talking about 10 - 15% gains in core performance, and it could potentially see even larger increases in total chip performance by pulling other levers. Vishera is an example of AMD doing just that. The Piledriver cores by themselves don't increase performance tremendously, but they do give AMD a little more thermal headroom to work with thanks to some more efficient design decisions and better transistor choice. With Vishera, AMD took the additional power headroom and turned into a frequency advantage. The result is AMD's FX-8350 can operate in the same power envelope as the outgoing FX-8150, yet runs at an 11% higher base clock (turbo frequency remains the same). Through frequency and core level improvements, AMD was able to deliver a bit more than the 10 - 15% performance increased in promised.
If AMD is able to repeat these improvements again next year, I wondered whether or not it would get any closer to closing the gap with Intel - particularly when it came to single threaded performance. We already know from our Haswell investigations that Intel is expecting around a 5 - 15% increase in CPU performance from Haswell over Ivy Bridge. If we assume that Haswell delivers towards the 15% end of that spectrum, and if we assume that Steamroller delivers the same level of improvements that we saw from Piledriver/Vishera, we end up with some pretty interesting predictions for where things end up next year. I modeled the 2013 performance of high-end AMD and Intel platforms based on those two factors and plotted the curves in a few different benchmarks. For each generation I used the parts that AMD stacked up against one another (they are also fairly similarly priced). For 2011 I used the FX-8150 vs. Intel's Core i5 2500 and for 2012 I used the FX-8350 vs. Intel's Core i5 3570. The 2013 data is of course projected based on a 15% increase in performance from Haswell, and a repeat of the Vishera vs. Zambezi increase for AMD. This is mostly an interesting experiment so don't get too invested in the data.
We'll start with Cinebench, by far the most painful of the tests for AMD from a single-threaded performance perspective:
The Vishera gains here were decent but not enough to dramatically shrink the performance gap. Furthermore, Intel put a good amount of distance in place with Ivy Bridge and if it can continue that with Haswell I don't see much hope here.
The multithreaded Cinebench results begin in AMD's favor and remain so even with our projected performance data.
Mozilla's Kraken benchmark is another example of single threaded performance gone awry for AMD.
Thankfully, Vishera does close the gap by a decent amount and if AMD extends those gains it is on an intercept course with Intel. The bad news is, that intercept wouldn't be in 2013.
POV-Ray provides another point of view on single threaded performance, here the situation looks far less dire than under Cinebench:
Unfortunately the curves remain fairly distinct.
Once again, when we increase thread count we see AMD pull ahead.
SYSMark is a particularly telling benchmark as it is lightly threaded and does a good job of simulating all types of workloads:
The result here is AMD closing in, albeit slowly, on Intel's performance advantage. I suspect this is quite possibly the best case scenario for AMD, it doesn't necessarily want to surpass Intel in performance but it wants to get close enough where pricing and other factors (e.g. GPU performance in its APU parts) can make a bigger difference.
Our Visual Studio 2012 test is a good combination of single threaded and multithreaded workloads in one:
With Vishera, AMD did a lot to close the gap betwen itself and Intel. Another increase like this and we won't see AMD surpass Intel, but the two should remain fairly close.
These last two tests show us the other side of the coin. If both AMD and Intel continue on their present tracks, what will happen in a test where AMD already does well today?
In areas where AMD holds a significant advantage, Haswell would need to deliver more than a 15% gain in performance at the same price point to catch up.
None of the results here are all that surprising. AMD remaining on its current course isn't enough to dramatically change its standings vs. Intel in another year. Vishera definitely cut into the performance delta, but the 2013 follow-up will have to do even more to really have an impact. Steamroller is far more focused on increasing IPC, however without a new process node it'll be difficult to demonstrate another gain in frequency like we see today with Vishera. I suspect the real chance for AMD to approach parity in many of these workloads will be with its 20nm architecture, perhaps based on Excavator in 2014.
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CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, October 30, 2012 - link
LOL - seems like... hahahahhahahah in some imaginary future in a far off land, if and when and only if amd does xxxx and yyyyyy and blah blah blah blah,.... blew it.g101 - Wednesday, November 21, 2012 - link
More extreme ignorance from the idiot CeriseCogburn. Little boys who only game should seriously consider not commenting on things they aren't capable of comprehending.Stupid little bitchboy CeriseCogburn...What a waste of oxygen.
DDR4 - Wednesday, November 7, 2012 - link
nice to see AMD make better procs and lower their pricesandrewkoch - Friday, November 9, 2012 - link
If you live in an area that requires A/C most of the year like me, the true cost of owning a FX8350 processor is about an additional $100 year vs. owing a 3570k.Fx8350 +15 watts idle +95 watts load vs. i5 3570k
50 hours week light cpu usage = 75W
10 hours week heavy cpu usage = 760w
Combined usage = 1025w @$0.11 Kw/h = $1.12
A/C usage 75%-80% @$0.11 Kw/h = $.84
Extra electrical cost $2/week
Extra electrical cost $100/yearly or $300/3 years
Maybe my math is wrong, but if you use A/C most of the year and pay for electricity an AMD cpu is a waste of money. Then again some people still use incandescent light bulbs instead of compact fluorescent lamps or LED bulbs.
andrewkoch - Saturday, November 10, 2012 - link
LoL my math was wrong in the above post.Fx8350 +15 watts idle +95 watts load vs. i5 3570k
68 hours week light cpu usage = 1kW
100 hours week heavy cpu usage = 9.5w
Combined weekly usage = 10.5kw @$0.11 Kw/h = $01.15
Average A/C usage 80%*$1.15 @$0.11 Kw/h = $.0.92
Extra electrical cost $2/week vs. owing a 3570k
Extra electrical cost $100/yearly or $300/3 years vs. owing a 3570k
In this usage scenario the computer is heavily used for tasks like folding, gaming or video editing
criter - Saturday, November 17, 2012 - link
121117Intel is a semiconductor company first; and a microprocessor company second ($13.5B revenue [#3.8B quarter])
used to make a living making memory chips (dram) until they became commoditized by Japanese rivals in the 1980s and margins plunged, now volume produced microprocessors happen to be the most profitable;
makes more useable chips per $5B-300mm & $7B-450mm/+40to120% extra chips wafer fabs, (90% yield range vs 60 to 80% rivals), moving to 22nm geometries, 14nm by 4q13;
Chips take about 3 months to make and they are put through more than 300 separate processes
intel atom vs brit arm (less pwr & customizable, 98% of cellphones since 2005 have had arms in them) for touch panel (w8) mobile/cell phone/tablet mkt
i3 55W ceiling...
amd Piledriver (x86 architecture) retail Oct 2012, 4c, 8c, L2&3 16MB, am3+, ddr3, dx11, 32nm; 1st gen Zambezi; (pdriver performs +15% than bulldozer;)
FX4300 8MB/95w, 3.8GHz, $131, 4c
FX6300 14MB/95w, 3.5GHz, $176, 6c
fx8320 16MB/125w, 3.5GHz, $242, 8c
fx8350 16MB/125w, 4GHz, $253, 8c
K10 4q07 (phenom x4/IIx3/IIx4, gen3 Opteron), K8 2q03 (Athlon 64/64x2, Sempron 64), k7 3q99 (Athlon/xp, Duron, Sempron)
?Trinity apu (AcceleratedProcessingUnit, pdriver) architecture (2gen x86 cores) Oct 1, integrated gpu, 'fusion' fm2 formfactor (previous llano use fm1 socket), dx11 (shader5), (radion A4-7480 to A10-7660 hd gpu)
Merom mobile arch (1q06, 667-800MT/s, 35W, bga479, socketM&P; updated 65nm [fab] Yonah core P6[pentium pro '95]) marked Intel’s acknowledging that the Pentium 4 (netburst arch) was not a viable long term solution because power efficiency is crucial to success;
65nm Conroe desktop (core2 quad, 800 MT/s, 65W, lga775); Woodcrest (lga771) 1333 scaled down to 1066MT/s workstation (40W@1.6-1.86GHz, 80W 3GHz), server(xeon socket604&lga771);
differing socket(M,P,T,fcbga), bus speed and pwr consumption; the identical Core microarchitecture was designed by Israel's Intel Israel (IDC) team;
stepping represent incremental improvements but also different sets of features like cache size and low power modes;
Nehalem 45nm (16pipeline), Westmere 32nm; Sandy bridge 32nm, ivy bridg 22nm; Haswell 22nm, Broadwell 14nm; Skylake 14nm, Skymont 10nm;
sandy bridge 32nm integrated x86 microprocessor as SoC (cpu/gpu+last lvl cache+sys I/O) vs amd bulldozer
intel haswell dual-threaded, out-of-order cpu arch 22nm FinFET, (high end tablets, low pwr)
theoretical peak performance for Haswell is over double that of Sandy Bridge, twice the FLOP/s, cache bandwidth doubled, vs '13 amd Steamroller core & w8;
g101 - Wednesday, November 21, 2012 - link
What is this pile of copy/pasted shit?Principle - Thursday, November 29, 2012 - link
Why is it that every review I see, no one uses the RAM that the CPU memory controller is rated for? Or in overclocking, did you see what a RAM overclock added?Just because your Intel chip may not perform any better with 1333, 1600, or 1866, doesnt mean you dont run your AMD chip with the 1866 its rated for. I see this all over the review sites. You dont have to use the same RAM in both systems for a comparison of CPU performance. RAM choice is designed into the CPU, and has an affect.
ThaSpacePope - Monday, December 3, 2012 - link
Nice job AMD. I guess some of these benchmarks are skewed because windows 8 is superior to windows 7 because it uses the modules better, but still.. the $166 8350 outperforms in some cases or comes close to the performance of a $200 i5-3570k.This is great news for AMD. Keep up the good work!
jreyes2254 - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
I find it funny all the Intel lovers are hating on so called AMD "fanboys."Isnt defending Intel and hating on AMD in turn make you all Intel "Fanboys."?
...Intel has not served me well I havent used one since my ol P4... I gladly claim the title of AMD "Fanboy.".
I have this CPU, Its pretty Epic.