AMD - Piledriver chitchat

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Wow, i hadn't really looked at the 6300's results. nice win in Skyrim, but still falls flat in Dawn of War?

Edit: Is there even a point buying anything Intel from the i3 downwards now?

Dawn of War performance appears to be around Core i7 920 level performance on an FX6300. How that relates to Core i3 3220 performance I don't know.

Yeah, I noticed Scan seemed to have relatively high prices (and no stock).

Power draw is still an issue, as is single threaded performance. Looks like not many people are getting past ~ 4.5/4.6GHz either - don't know if that's a first batch issue and later samples will OC better, but that's not going to please the enthusiasts much.

In some reviews there was noise about reviewers by using the latest motherboard BIOS could hit higher overclocks - some reviews do hit closer to 5GHZ. OTH,it could be down to the resonant clock mesh tech??

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It seems the FX6300 is around 10% faster than a Phenom II X4 980BE in Dawn of War:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/699?vs=362

The Core i3 2100 appears to be around 10% faster in Dawn of War than a Phenom II X4 980BE:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/289?vs=362

It appears the FX6300 is around Core i3 2100 level performance in Dawn of War.

[scaryjim]

Looks like availability is very low - most shops don't even have them listed yet (none at novatech or ebuyer). Aria have ultra-keen pricing, and at < £100 a 6300 looks an absolute steal, although I can't see the point of the 4300 at less than a tenner less than the 6300 - the A10-5800K gives you almost as much of a CPU, plus decent graphics, for the same price. Anandtech bench suggests the only benefit the FX has in dGPU gaming, at which point the extra £10 for a 6300 buys you an extra module and twice as much L3 cache, providing more performance in pretty much every situation.

Only realistic outcome of that is an early price hack on the 4300, IMNSHO At £80 it becomes a worthy budget gaming option.

[DanceswithUnix]

At £80 I would have bought a 4300, but at the current pricing (I am assuming availability isn't pushing it up that much atm) I have just twitched and gone for a Trinity A10 quad core for my home server rebuild.

Would have preferred AM3+, but the state of uATX motherboards on that platform is frankly shocking atm. £60 got me a very nice A75 chipset Gigabyte board with lots of fast sata connectors for disks, usb3 to back it up, and plenty of grunt for a few virtual machines. Part of me thinks I could have plumped for the £40 dual core CPU and saved some money, but sod it this should be enough performance for years to come rather than for now.

[scaryjim]

Yeah, the A10 is almost identical CPU-wise but offers much better platform support. AM3+ is restricted to either decent motherboards that require discrete graphics (and are mostly full ATX at that), or graphically anaemic, feature-void cheap-ass 760G mATX mobos*. And of course that's only exacerbated by the fact that you have to spend £50 to get a better GPU than the IGP in an A10. Lord, even the A4-5300 has an IGP that's roughly equivalent to a 6450.

You've got to think that this is the last generation of consumer/desktop AM3+ CPUs - if AMD wanted to breathe any life into the platform surely they'd have introduced a new chipset by now. I'm more and more starting to think that the onyl reason for the 4300 is that they had more defective dies than they wanted to throw away and a 2 module, 4MB L3 SKU gave them the best chance of binning those dies. If yields improve I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the 4300 slip quietly from the shelves, leaving the 3 and 4 module FX chips as essentially a "budget enthusiast" platform, with the assumption that everyone who gets one will have at least a 990X chipset mobo. Indeed today may be the last enthusiast-targeted release by AMD.


*actually, I've found a very small number of 880G mobos on ebuyer, mostly ex-display models, and some of them listed under AM3, instead of AM3+. But AM3+ support in general, and for mATX in particular, remains poor.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/880-...ver-4-ghz.html

[Terbinator]

The [H] review is painful.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The [H] review is painful.

So was there A10 review which was one of the worst reviews I have read in years.

Why not test stock to stock and what happened to their much vaunted "playable" settings "realworld" benchmarks. Back to canned benchmarks,since it suits them.

I place them in the same category as Bit-tech now,with Bit-tech actually being a tad better.

Edit!!

I think I know what might have happened.

Firstly they got sponsored by Galaxy and secondly they used to have a decent working relationship with AMD. At the HD5800 series launch AMD actually held a big event with them. I suspect,AMD might have ditched them with the last round of cuts and hence they are doing a Tweaktown.

[Terbinator]

They start with:

Given the performance you see on the following pages against the overclocker's favorite Intel cores, you will see why AMD has priced its new FX series Vishera processors as it has.

and then on the last page write:

Is Vishera a better part than Intel's Ivy Bridge or previous Sandy Bridge processors? No it is not, not even close.

They offer 0 justification for using the i7 only as well as running them all at the same speed.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I added a possible explanation with my last post. I think the rot started when they got sponsored by Galaxy who only sell Nvidia cards,and starting just recommending them willy-nilly plus they started changing their benchmarking methods a bit. Then along the line they probably got dropped by AMD as a close partner,and probably did a Tweaktown,ie,needed to compensate in some way for it.

[scaryjim]

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/880-...ver-4-ghz.html

Image isn't showing for me cat - don't know if they've prevented hot-linking or something.

Interesting article though, average 8% increase in applications and 13.5% increase in games at the same clocks! If they can do that again going from Piledriver to Steamroller (big ask though) Intel might genuinely have some competition

[DanceswithUnix]

Yeah, the A10 is almost identical CPU-wise but offers much better platform support. AM3+ is restricted to either decent motherboards that require discrete graphics (and are mostly full ATX at that), or graphically anaemic, feature-void cheap-ass 760G mATX mobos*. And of course that's only exacerbated by the fact that you have to spend £50 to get a better GPU than the IGP in an A10. Lord, even the A4-5300 has an IGP that's roughly equivalent to a 6450.

You've got to think that this is the last generation of consumer/desktop AM3+ CPUs - if AMD wanted to breathe any life into the platform surely they'd have introduced a new chipset by now. I'm more and more starting to think that the onyl reason for the 4300 is that they had more defective dies than they wanted to throw away and a 2 module, 4MB L3 SKU gave them the best chance of binning those dies. If yields improve I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the 4300 slip quietly from the shelves, leaving the 3 and 4 module FX chips as essentially a "budget enthusiast" platform, with the assumption that everyone who gets one will have at least a 990X chipset mobo. Indeed today may be the last enthusiast-targeted release by AMD.


*actually, I've found a very small number of 880G mobos on ebuyer, mostly ex-display models, and some of them listed under AM3, instead of AM3+. But AM3+ support in general, and for mATX in particular, remains poor.

I don't really see something like FM2 being a big hit in servers. As long as you need 2 & 4 socket motherboards, you will need something more like AM3+ and if they make it for the server users they may as well flog a few to the enthusiast market.

As for the uATX motherboard market, yes it came down to a single Asus motherboard that had 4 ram sockets and 140W cpu support. That was the same price almost as the A75 board I ended up ordering. ISTR the 9x0 chipsets are basically a re-labelling of the 8x0 chipsets and so still have the integrated graphics capability hidden away in there somewhere. Looks like motherboard manufacturers won't make uATX motherboard without that graphics support though.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I don't really see something like FM2 being a big hit in servers. As long as you need 2 & 4 socket motherboards, you will need something more like AM3+ and if they make it for the server users they may as well flog a few to the enthusiast market.

As for the uATX motherboard market, yes it came down to a single Asus motherboard that had 4 ram sockets and 140W cpu support. That was the same price almost as the A75 board I ended up ordering. ISTR the 9x0 chipsets are basically a re-labelling of the 8x0 chipsets and so still have the integrated graphics capability hidden away in there somewhere. Looks like motherboard manufacturers won't make uATX motherboard without that graphics support though.

The sort of servers AMD is thinking of with Seamicro,will use Jaguar and ULV versions of Trinity and Kaveri. They use loads of low TDP CPUs - Intel is trying to do the same with the server version of Atom. In fact when AMD,bought Seamicro,it seems some people at Intel were not pleased and started slating the company publicly - Seamicro was one of the few companies Intel produced custom CPUs for.

[scaryjim]

I don't really see something like FM2 being a big hit in servers.

Probably not - it's possible, I suppose, that they've just not decided on their entry-level server platform yet. I guess it will come down to whether they think HT or dual channel DDR3 is limiting in a server environment. Either way, I think it will definitely be the case that the enthusiast desktop environment for AMD will be determined by their server plans: all the roadmaps basically block out the next couple of years with Vishera as the only consumer enthusiast product and all the new products being APU based. That may well mean that we'll never see AMD compete with Intel on single-threaded performance again. It could also mean you're relying on manufacturers to produce good enthusiast motherboards rather than AMD to produce a capable enthusiast chipset - server chipsets aren't really designed with overclocking and ultimate performance in mind

ISTR the 9x0 chipsets are basically a re-labelling of the 8x0 chipsets and so still have the integrated graphics capability hidden away in there somewhere.

They never official rebadged the 880G or the 890GX - there is no 980G/990GX, and therefore no 900 series chipset with integrated graphics. All previous AM3-compatible chipsets should work, but it's very much up to mobo manufacturers to support the platform: AMD have basically abandoned integrated graphics on AM3+ (after all, they'd much rather everyone moved to APUs...)

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The AM3+ CPUs are basically AMD server CPUs re-jigged for the desktop. Once AMD leaves the high performance server market,expect no more non-APU CPUs from AMD.

[scaryjim]

... Once AMD leaves the high performance server market ...

Can't see that happening. x86 supercomputing is a halo product, and the whole Bulldozer modular architecture is highly optimised for server workloads. Of course, AMDs aim is to persuade the server market to move more towards heterogenous computing and shifting parallel code onto GPUs so they can sell APUs to the server market as well. But I can't see them ever abandoning the high-end x86 server market, which means there should always be some kind of product to feed down to the enthusiast market.

Perhaps they'll consolidate on 2 server sockets, one for 1P-2P systems and one for 2P-4P systems, then make specific 1P chipset/motherboards for the low-end server socket. That might make some sense, and it reduces the number of platforms they have to support. After all, they've been stuck with the same basic chipset layout for pushing 10 years now - got to be time for a change soon, surely...?