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 ESTGeneral 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 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:
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.
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.
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.
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
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coder111 - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
Now what I'd like to see is how many of these benchmarks are compiled with intel compiler. In case you don't know yet, Intel Compiler disables a lot of optimizations if you are not running a Genuine Intel CPU, even if your CPU supports required features and would benefit from these optimizations. In other words, anything compiled with intel compiler will run slower on AMD cpus just because of Intel compiler.Now you can argue that this is a reflection of real performance on Windows, as in Windows quite a few of DLLs are compiled with Intel Compiler as well.
What I'd like to see is some more benchmarks for Linux operating system and/or professional software. Things like data base servers (including something non-Microsoft, like PostgreSQL or MySQL), java application servers, GCC compiler benchmarks, apache/PHP server, virtualization, python/perl/ruby, LibreOffice/OpenOffice productivity.
Now, back to Vishera. This looks like a nice CPU. I haven't been CPU bound in my work for a while now, so performance wise this would be sufficient for my needs. What I'd like to see however is lower power consumption. Unfortunatelly I don't see that coming until Global Foundries minimizes their process...
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, October 30, 2012 - link
So amd has abandoned gamers on the cpu side.Good to know.
Blibbax - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
The dragon age origins graph has the 8150 in blue and no i3.Blibbax - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
SC2 and WoW also.dishayu - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
7zip as wellBlibbax - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
"As I mentioned earlier however, this particular test runs quicker on Vishera however the test would have to be much longer in order to really give AMD the overall efficiency advantage. "If you think about it, efficiency is unrelated to length of test.
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, October 30, 2012 - link
He was talking about electrical usage vs work done, hence with amd's higher per second use of electricity, it must complete the test MUCH faster than Intel in order to win that.It completed faster, but not fast enough to use less power.
This lesson is over for amd.
iTzSnypah - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
In price per performance. A 125w part beating a 67w (Not sure about that figure) will cause Intel to keep the same TDW for 2014 and just have a 35-40% performance increase. I can only hope.CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, October 30, 2012 - link
If you're used to running or servicing Intel cpu's then you pick up the LEAD WEIGHT that is the modern AMD cpu, all that HEAT SINKING comes to mind.I mean they are just honkers. You pick it up and it's like what the heck !?
meloz - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
I wish Anandtech would include some form of value scatter graphs like Techreport does in its reviews. The graphs do not have to be an exact imitation of what Techreport does, and the benchmark(s) used to determine the 'overall performance' can be different. Perhas we could even get performance per watt per dollar graphs.Graphs like these make the whole exercise of comparing competing products so much more relevant to users, because most of us will buy the most performant processor per dollar.
As example:
http://techreport.com/r.x/amd-fx-8350/value-scatte...
http://techreport.com/r.x/amd-fx-8350/gaming-scatt...
This is, of course, considering the result without any attention to performance/watt. If you include power consumption in the calculations at all, Intel is an easy choice.
Difficult to see how AMD will cope with Haswell, even if they get another 15% boost next year. The gap in performance / watt only seems to be diverging, Intel taking a commanding lead.