AMD - Piledriver chitchat

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

They do at least accept that the decision is contentious, and the benchmarks you've linked are with an older Core i3 against an FX6350, rather than the Haswell v. FX-6300 they discuss in the budget rig - a faster i3 v a slower FX-6 could be pretty close. Plus they give other considerations (although I'm not sure "no known upgrade path" is a valid one the way Intel have been changing sockets recently) like power consumption and platform features.

Personally, I'd recommend the FX6300 every time at the minute, but the i3-4130 is at least sensibly priced and presumably competitive, particularly in the many older games that *don't* use many threads (then again, older games are unlikely to need that much CPU horsepower anyway). As TR say, the AMX platform is very long in the tooth, the chipsets aren't modern (AFAIK the 900 series are just rebadges of the 800 series?), and Intel still win the straight line race by a mile. For longevity, I think AMDs extra cores outweigh those facts, but that's more of an opinion than an unassailable truth....

An FX-series chip with six threads, for example, could do better in the heavily multithreaded workloads that might appear in next-gen games—but it will also do worse when a single thread is the bottleneck, which is a common situation today and will remain so in the future.

So, yeah. The Core i3-4130 it is.

However unlikely, it's possible that multithreaded performance could matter more than we expect in next-gen games.

It seems TR cannot even bother to read their own review though. If you add 10% to the Core i3 and subtract 10% for the FX6350,is a Haswell Core i3 superior? I am being generous for the Haswell Core i3.

Eh,nope??

Even the section of Crysis3 they test is not the CPU intensive part and that is where a Core i3 gets slaughtered.

Plus consider the fact that you can overclock the FX6300 on the board they mentioned,it just smacks of a lazy argument on their point.

Its even worse when you consider the Core i3 4130 and motherboard they suggest costs $213 and the FX6350 and motherboard they suggested costs $215.

Regarding features,both platforms support USB3 and SATA3.0,and only PCI-E 3.0 is the missing feature of note. OTH,the Core i3 is going to be too weak for games where it would probably matter the most,ie, FPS games.

[watercooled]

I'm not sure I'd go as far as to call an i3 reasonably priced for a butchered (in terms of pointlessly blown features) dual core. This isn't an argument BTW, just a general rant. A lot of the features/instructions/accelerators would arguably more use in the lower powered dual cores vs the expensive high end chips. The die-harvesting excuse people give is nonsense - most of these features simply cannot *be* broken in isolation, they're just deliberately disabled for marketing reasons (up-selling).

Of course it's just an opinion, but I'm not overly keen on the idea of buying a chip which likely started out a lot better from the fab, before the marketing department got their hands on it and undid some of the actual hard work which went into producing the silicon.

And that's a reason I respect AMD, for just leaving all of those sorts of features enabled top-to-bottom, no silly fuse blowing.

As for being a dual core, it's one of those points we've seen brought up from time to time - how many actual demanding apps, or remotely modern games, rely on purely single-threaded performance nowadays? Sure, some 5 year old game might run at 220fps on an i3 and 180fps for a 6300 at 640x480 resolution, lowest settings, but does that actually have much importance back in the real world? As CAT said, the dual will start to fall down where it actually matters, for example newer demanding games which are increasingly well-threaded and start struggling below three or four cores.

[DanceswithUnix]

An interesting Kaveri overview article:

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news...-analysis.aspx

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news...-a-bullet.aspx

LOL!

[scaryjim]

... It seems TR cannot even bother to read their own review though. If you add 10% to the Core i3 and subtract 10% for the FX6350,is a Haswell Core i3 superior?

Mu. You just can't tell without testing them against each other. I suspect the i3-4130 and FX-6300 are somewhat closer in performance than the i3 3225 and the FX 6350, but we won't know unless someone does a side-by-side test of the two.

Its even worse when you consider the Core i3 4130 and motherboard they suggest costs $213 and the FX6350 and motherboard they suggested costs $215.

That's a better point - they recommend the 6300 @ $10 less than the i3, but could easily have recommend the 6350 @ $10 more than the i3. When the motherboard for the AMD rig is almost $10 cheaper, why recommend the cheaper CPU too? The FX-6350 brings the build to the same price, the FX-6300 saves enough to get more than half way to a 7870 instead (FX-6300 + 7870 would be ~ $13 more than the recommended build).

Regarding features,both platforms support USB3 and SATA3.0,and only PCI-E 3.0 is the missing feature of note.

I thought SB950 didn't have USB3 natively? Of course, if mobo manufacturers are putting 3rd party USB3 chips on their lower-cost boards anyway, it's a bit moot. As to PCIe, one of the potential issues is that the Hypertransport implementation AMD use for AM3+ would struggle to saturate a PCIe 2.0 x16 link. I'm not sure whether there are any cards available yet that could saturate a 2.0 x16 link, though, so again that might be moot.

It's valid to point out that the FX-6300 can be overclocked (although intel did bring back FSB overclocking on locked haswell, didn't they? Don't know much about that though), although how often have we advised people against making a purchase solely on the basis of overclocking? Plus you'd need a decent aftermarket cooler to overclock the FX-6300 (it's a 95W CPU so will get the same naff aluminium cube that came with our A6s!), which is going to push the cost back up past the i3 (and potentially the 6350).

In the UK the price differential is greater (the 6350 is £20 more than the 6300, rather than $20), which means the 6350 isn't really in the same price bracket as the i3, and I think the haswell i3 v the 6300 is a much closer battle (although, again, we'd need to see proper comparative benchmarks). A 10% reduction in clock speeds is pretty significant on an architecture that's designed to clock high.

But in the US, where the prices between the platforms are directly comparable, there's no good reason to recommend an i3 over an FX-6350. I think whoever wrote that article hasn't read *any* tech press in the last three months. "However unlikely, it's possible that multithreaded performance could matter more than we expect in next-gen games." - they seem to have missed that games are already getting more heavily threaded; they seem to think that because Jaguar is a lower performance core a quad core (or dual with HT) will be able to match it in well-threaded workloads, because it can process each thread twice as fast (but that's not how over-threading on lower core counts works); they seem to have missed a couple of high profile games that already run better on slower processors with more cores; in fact, they seem to have been living in a cave.

There's no accounting for the determination of some people to promote their preferred component - like they recommend the locked i5's at $189 instead of the 8350 at $199, too.


You know, the most interesting thing to come out of this for me is that newegg have the 9370 with liquid cooling kit for $289 - wonder if they'll start trickling into the UK market? A ~ £200 octocore with all in one liquid cooler would be a pretty tasty deal...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The thing is TR was recommending the Core i3 3220 even when the FX6300 and FX6350 were available. The performance difference in newer games is a decent amount,even looking at the TR review. So someone who had an FX6300 since Christmas has done very well and a person with a Core i3 3220 not so good.

Edit!!

They pretty much ignore the FX6300 and FX6350 in previous guides:

http://techreport.com/review/25250/t...system-guide/2
http://techreport.com/review/24979/t...system-guide/2

A lot of these build guides seem to be an afterthought, which is annoying especially since the people are getting paid for doing them.

If I were in their situation,I would at least be bothered to try and do a good job. Heck if any of us were paid we would probably do a better job IMHO.

[CountBartok]

Yes it is strange how supposed tech sites sometimes seem not to be bothered.
It is almost like they think .....well this is what most people believe lets stick with that.

Me well my fx6200 seems to be the only cpu i've owned that is getting better with age.
I also bought it during the 'more cores more cash back' promo, think it cost me around £75.00.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

AMD AMA:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/...ntatives.html#

[watercooled]

http://www.techspot.com/news/54621-s...own-video.html

PS4 official teardown. Secondary processor is really a second physical IC - I wonder if it's also Jaguar based, or perhaps ARM?

The former may make more sense - code would be easily portable across the processors, and it could be made on a lower-leakage process to reduce power consumption. An ARM-based CPU may result in a smaller die and potentially lower power, but with power gating and considering it's mains-powered, the differences may not be all that great. Also, I wonder if the PSU switches modes somehow to conserve power in standby? Seeing how this all fits together would be interesting, also in terms of memory access/connectivity!

The motherboard does look remarkably clean though, like the XB One, thanks largely to the SoC nature of the processing components.

I wonder how die size of the two compares? The Xbox likely dedicates a significant portion of the die to the on-board memory, while the PS4 has a larger GPU section.

I can't really tell for sure from the video as a lot of the text is blurred out on the die, but I wonder who fabs the main processor?

Edit: The animated re-assembly at the end makes it look like the HDD is user-replaceable without having to open the main case, therefore avoiding breaking the warranty seals.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

AFAIK,the secondary processor is an ARM based one.

[watercooled]

Interesting, I wonder how it would work? It could be always active and responsible for its assigned tasks, or only active when in standby. I seem to recall it would be used for 'background tasks', so probably the former?

Some sort of simple (perhaps proprietary) serial bus could be used for interrupts, for the main system to pass tasks to it. But then you have the issue with two processors accessing resources like storage/networking; I wonder if the 'southbridge' is off the main SoC? Perhaps this secondary chip contains it?

Also, it looks like the video has been taken down.

Edit: Video is available here: http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/1...eardown-video/

[Noxvayl]

I had not heard of CondeNaste before but my first impression is a bad one because they insist on enforcing artificial boundaries on the internet.

As for the PS 4 the heatsink is surprisingly small. It looks better than the stock AMD and Intel ones but then you'd expect that considering this is meant for the living room where noise is not acceptable. Perhaps I am over estimating the heat it produces. I like how it all fits together, well thought out and should be easy to repair. I am sure users will love the ability to change the hard drive although I'm not sure how important storage space is for games, they seem to be growing in size quite rapidly and the extra grunt these new consoles provide is probably going to accelerate their expansion.

I am eager to see how games change as a result of these new consoles. Gaming is becoming more interesting each year.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Interesting:

http://www.timesunion.com/business/a...ng-4962153.php
http://www.commonplatform.com/about/

[scaryjim]

http://www.timesunion.com/business/a...ng-4962153.php

contains the line

GlobalFoundries is also a foundry

Classic

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It seems TSMC might be the fab for the PS4 SOC:

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/ga...-0563_edit.jpg

The SOC is made in Taiwan.

[watercooled]

I couldn't find those high-res photos for some reason, but yeah I can see 'diffused in Taiwan' now.

I was kind of expecting GloFo to be producing at least one of the next console processors! How much capacity can TSMC have on their 28nm line? After all it's not like this is a small, low-volume part, and AFAIK customers won't be switching to their volume 20nm process for a while yet.

A few mobile SoC MFRs seem to be showing interest in GloFo; maybe this has freed up some space?