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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wwwcd - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
Yes, we don't neeed of 8 core/threads for gaming today, but do You have prognosis for near future?
Kisper - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
Why would you upgrade for no reason other than speculation?If an advantage arises in heavily threaded games in the future, upgrade at that time. You'll get more processing power / $ spent in the future than you will at present.
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, October 30, 2012 - link
amd fanboys are pennywise and pound foolish, so buying the amd crap now, and telling everyone it has the deranged amd furuteboy advantage, works for them !I mean really, it sucks so freaking bad, they cannot help themselves, like a crack addict they must have and promote, so heck, the last hope of the loser is telling everyone how bright they are and how on down the line in the imaginary years ahead their current pileofcrap will "truly shine!"
LOL - oh man, funny but so true.
Spunjji - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
Prognosis for the near future is that having that many threads will still not be a whole lot of use for gaming. See Amdahl's law for why.Samus - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
It's safe to say all programs/games going forward will take advantage of four cores or more. Battlefield 3 released LAST year and basically requires 4 cores in order to be GPU-limited (as in the game is CPU limited with just about any videocard unless you have 4 cores.c0d1f1ed - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
Amdahl's Law is not a reason. There is plenty of task parallelism to exploit. The real issue is ROI, and there's two aspects to that. One is that multi-threaded development is freakishly hard. Unlike single-threaded development, you cannot know exactly what each thread is doing at any given time. You need to synchronised to make certain actions deterministic. But even then you can end up with race conditions if you're not careful. The current synchronization methods are just very primitive. Intel will fix that with Haswell. The TSX technology enables hardware lock elision and hardware transactional memory. Both will make the developer's life a lot easier, and also make synchronization more efficient.
The second aspect isn't about the costs but about the gains. It has taken quite a while for more than two cores to become the norm. So it just wasn't worth it for developers to go through all the pain of scalable fine-grained multi-threaded development if the average CPU is still only a dual-core. Haswell's TSX technology will come right in time as quad-core becomes mainstream. Also, Haswell will have phenomenal Hyper-Threading performance thanks to two nearly symmetrical sets of two integer execution units.
AMD needs to implement TSX and AVX2 sooner rather than later to stay in the market.
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, October 30, 2012 - link
Nice post. Appreciate it.And ouch for amd once again.
surt - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
No, gaming won't need that many threads in the near future either. Nobody is going to make a game demand more than 4 threads because that's what common gamer systems support.AnnihilatorX - Wednesday, October 24, 2012 - link
I disagree. Say we have a hypothetical game that support 8 threads. The overhead of over-threading in a quad core system is frankly, not very much, while it may provide improvements on people with octocore or Intel processors with hyper-threading.AnnihilatorX - Wednesday, October 24, 2012 - link
In fact, there are many games nowadays that split workload into many threads for economic simulation, background AI planning in user phase, physics, audio, graphics subthread, network management, preloading and resources management. It is just that even with the parallelism, there bound to be bottlenecks in single threading that a 8 core may not benefit at all compared to 4 cores.So I disagree, it is not about people not spending resources in making parallelism or not supporting it. It is the nature of the workload that is the determining factor.