Preview: AMD's FX-9590 Eight-Core At Up To 5.0GHz On Linux

[CrystalGamma]

Sure thing but AMD is veeeery far away from "socketed, but a new socket each year" so kudos to them.

I was just saying that this change in Intel policy is not THAT big IMO

Since my first computer I always went Intel (486) -> AMD (486DX4) -> Intel (Pentium 166) -> AMD (K6-2 350) -> Intel (P3 733) -> AMD (AthlonXP 2500+D) -> Intel (PentiumDC 2GHz) -> ... still going for 6 years now. C'mon AMD, still waiting for that comeback.

Hopefully SkyBridge will make them more competitive again ... and even if their new x86 cores are not much better, thanks to pin-compatibility (or so it was said) you can try out the ARM versions as well

[jrch2k8]

well the problem with bulldozer architecture is that is not Intel's and low IPC, what i mean with this is:

1.) low IPC is obvious enough but is not that utterly slow all the time
2.) Developers follow intel's way, so many neat features in bulldozer that can in many scenarios improve a lot the performance are bypassed since intel processors aren't using them like FMA3, AVX, etc. and many commercial apps use ICC in their toolchain and wide that gap a lot more

in the same way Haswell suffers from this too since developers don't target AVX2.0, bmi, fma4, etc too often because the biggest CPU market share lowest denominator rely on SSE2 but if you target those new instruction and compares it to Ivy bridge the difference is huge.

So until developers start using those architectures improvements more often bulldozer and haswell+ won't see huge improvements in performance in the big picture.

[mendieta]

Wrong game for AMD

I can't believe they put thisthing out there. At 220W TDP , let's compare with the FX-9590 vs i7-4790K:

1. The AMD chip is only 13% cheaper ($340 vs 300 currently at newegg)
2. The Intel chip is betwen 30 and 50% faster, let's settle at 40%.
3. The AMD chip uses 2.5 times as much power! (220/88 TDP ratio)
4. The last two combined imply a performance per watt 3.5 times higher for the Intel chip.
5. Performance per dollar, _at face value, is 25% higher for Intel. Energy costs will make this ratio increase significantly if you really use the chip.

Complete, utter disaster. Who TF is making these decisions @ AMD?

AMD has great potential, on the GPU side. They should focus on APU's, get the software open, provide cheaper gaming and small form factor PC packages. Work with AMD on hybrid chips, etc. The future is low power and mobile, it's integrated electronics as in SoCs and APU. There is room there for AMD. Please go that way, we need you alive and kicking.

[Dukenukemx]

Rumor going around that AMD has a NDA going on for some new products they're about to release. Nothing huge I hear but sub $200 stuff, so likely means more tweaked FX and APU CPU's? Maybe AMD will finally add that super cache for their graphics like Intel did with Iris Pro? I'd give it another month before the NDA gets lifted.

[Michael]

There's going to be lots of Linux hardware benchmarks on Phoronix in September.

[Dukenukemx]

I can't believe they put thisthing out there. At 220W TDP , let's compare with the FX-9590 vs i7-4790K:

1. The AMD chip is only 13% cheaper ($340 vs 300 currently at newegg)
2. The Intel chip is betwen 30 and 50% faster, let's settle at 40%.
3. The AMD chip uses 2.5 times as much power! (220/88 TDP ratio)
4. The last two combined imply a performance per watt 3.5 times higher for the Intel chip.
5. Performance per dollar, _at face value, is 25% higher for Intel. Energy costs will make this ratio increase significantly if you really use the chip.

Let me tell you that the FX-9590 is trash. The problem though is that the CPU draws a lot of power, and that can slow down the CPU. The problem is the VRMs on the motherboards. I have an 8350 with a pretty good Gigabyte motherboard and it cooks those VRMs. I had to put a waterblock on the VRMs just to get them to a decent temperature. That ASRock Fatal1ty 990FX Killer is probably not good enough to handle the 9590, which would explain why in some tests that the CPU would slow down compared to the 8350. When VRMs get too hot the motherboard will throttle to prevent the VRM from shutting down, cause VRMs will shut down when it reaches a certain temp which just crashes the system. This is more of an issue with motherboard manufacturers than AMD's CPUs, but AMD has done nothing to stop motherboard makers from putting shitty VRMs with sometimes no heatsink on their boards and label them as 8 core capable. Even the 6 core FX chips have heat issues with motherboard VRMs. I had to put heatsinks on a new motherboard with AMD A10 6800K cause Prime95 would always crash and sure enough the VRM's are hot enough to burn your fingers. Also doesn't help that water cooling doesn't throw any air over those VRMs. Seriously run a heavy duty test and put your finger directly underneath the VRMs. Some people have warped their motherboards with 8350's cooking those VRMs.

But anything in the ~$120 price range or less you're better off with AMD. Nearly equal in performance on the CPU, but far better performance on the GPU. It's when you gear near the $200 price range where it gets hard to justify a AMD, cause 9/10 an i5 is just better. I have an 8350 and it's nice but it only shines when an application can use all 8 cores, which is extremely rare. An i5 shines all the damn time, except when it comes to multi-threaded applications, and even then it's not that bad.

[peppercats]

I've had an FX-6300 for I guess nearly two years and I'm still happy with it - I paid something like $120 for it and the performance has been excellent.
Shame that AMD decided to drop out of making enthusiast CPUs though, going to have to pay an arm and a leg for my next upgrade.

[dungeon]

There's going to be lots of Linux hardware benchmarks on Phoronix in September.

Marek pushed hyperz patches right now, enable hyperz in further benchmarking of AMD GPUs and fly . I tested those 8 days day to day they are rock stable, no artifacts no lockups and even speeder than before

[mendieta]

But anything in the ~$120 price range or less you're better off with AMD. Nearly equal in performance on the CPU, but far better performance on the GPU. It's when you gear near the $200 price range where it gets hard to justify a AMD, cause 9/10 an i5 is just better. I have an 8350 and it's nice but it only shines when an application can use all 8 cores, which is extremely rare. An i5 shines all the damn time, except when it comes to multi-threaded applications, and even then it's not that bad.

Exactly my point about AMD's place these days in the industry. And yes, my current desktop is an i5-4670k, it sits at a sweet spot where pricing is not too high, IPC and there fore single core performance are great, graphis are pretty good, open source support is first class.

[peppercats]

I've had an FX-6300 for I guess nearly two years and I'm still happy with it - I paid something like $120 for it and the performance has been excellent.
Shame that AMD decided to drop out of making enthusiast CPUs though, going to have to pay an arm and a leg for my next upgrade.

After a bit of digging, it appears that AMD has a new FX line planned for late 2015 which is neat.
Also, I hope by 2016 ARM will be usable as a regular desktop processor because AMD seems to be putting a lot of effort into ARM.