Aside from the killer ‘Never Settle’ promotion kicked off this week to promote its Radeon GPUs, it seems that most news surrounding AMD lately bodes a sketchy (and scary) picture for its future. None of this is helped by the fact that its Bulldozer architecture, released last fall, really didn’t hit the mark it set out to. But let’s not get into that again. Here, we talk about the future, or at least the evolutionary upgrade to the first Bulldozer CPUs, called Vishera.
The latest CPUs are built upon AMD’s Piledriver architecture which this year’s Trinity APUs also were. That in itself brings some considerable advantages over Zambezi, although nothing in itself will offer a mind-blowing performance enhancement. AMD does promise the usual fare here, though. That includes improved performance and performance-per-watt.
The top-end model becomes the FX-8350, a 4.0GHz offering that tops-out at 4.2GHz with Turbo (a bit lackluster of a jump, but… 4GHz+!). It launches with a cool $195 price-tag, and according to launch reviews, earns its placement – for the most part. Intel’s competition at the same price-point suits AMD’s FX-8350 well, although gaming performance is a bit iffy. If you’re not ultra-concerned with that, then it looks like AMD’s offering will treat you right.
|
FX-8350 |
FX-8320 |
FX-6300 |
FX-4300 |
SRP |
$195 |
$169 |
$132 |
$122 |
Cores (Modules) |
8 |
8 |
6 |
4 |
Frequency |
4.0GHz |
3.5GHz |
3.5GHz |
3.8GHz |
Turbo Freq. |
4.2GHz |
4.0GHz |
4.1GHz |
4.0GHz |
L2 / L3 |
1MB / 8MB |
1MB / 8MB |
1MB / 8MB |
1MB / 4MB |
Unlocked |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
AVX / AES / FMA |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
As we’re still figuring out our CPU benchmarking situation at the moment, I’d recommend checking out the reviews of AMD’s latest chip at these friend sites: HotHardware, Legit Reviews and The Tech Report.