News - Rumour: AMD to unleash the Centurion - FX at 5GHz

[Willzzz]

Oh yeah Anandtech are biassed... That's always what people resort to when they have no proper argument.

And actually most of the benchmarks are from a completely different website and from 5 different tables, I could come up with more but I feel that would be rather pointless.

Multi-threaded games 3470 = 8350
Lightly-threaded games 3470 > 8350

Does anyone actually dispute that?

[watercooled]

Somewhat. But it's nowhere near as cut-and-dry as that.

Again, you listed a load of charts from the same website, most of which were inconclusive, one of which was clearly completely GPU-bound, and one which, based on your definitions, actually contradicted your point (in reality, the difference is of course well within error margins). The clock-for-clock comparisons are all but irrelevant when comparing the two as they are based on vastly different microarchitectures and were never intended to run at the same clock speeds, for many reasons.

From experience, it's more like old single-threaded and/or inefficiently-coded games (e.g. Skyrim with its use of the antique x87 code path), generally IVB performs better, but these also tend to be games where CPU will never realistically be a bottleneck, with a few exceptions of course.

Lightly-threaded games, it depends on the game and the depth of threading really. E.g. for games with some amount of multithreading but where it tends to be unbalanced, it's a similar story to above. However, for games with deeper and more balanced threading, things see to even out as can be seen by many new games which run happily on reasonably modern quad or above CPUs, but chug on even newer dual-cores.

More heavily threaded games, which are of course becoming more commonplace, tend to have PD CPUs performing exceptionally well considering their price point. For example, Crysis 3, which also really doesn't seem to like anything less than four cores. The new consoles should also make things interesting here.
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/Crysis...hmark-1056578/
http://pctuning.tyden.cz/multimedia/...snosti?start=6
The second site claims the i7 is running at 4.5GHz but I assume it's a typo. For demanding games, multi-threaded engines are only getting more common. Essentially, most modern games I know of which are CPU demanding tend to be fairly well threaded. Those which are only lightly/single-threaded are generally less CPU demanding overall, so will hit other bottlenecks first - e.g. while some sites like to test games at 800x600 and rant about the 270 vs 300 fps difference, it's truly unimportant for the real world.

Edit: That turned out a fair bit longer than I intended...

[PowerPie5000]

A 5GHz FX chip? I bet the power consumption will be on an epic scale and it still won't keep up with chips from Intel. GHz isn't everything these days and $795 is a joke.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

This is another chip like the TWKR Edition which is probably very leaky and meant for high clockspeeds,especially the record attempts.

[AGTDenton]

I thought oooh this could be a turning point but then came the "to be made available in very limited quantities" and now I'm totally unimpressed again.

[WritersBlock]

Hmmm, not dated 1 april.

I have no faith in AMD being able to produce a new chip able to compete with a decent i5, never mind an i7.

So it clocks at 5ghz, let's see what that allows it to do, and how much noise and heat it produces.

Seriously high cost.

[mikeybinns]

I think this is more of a marketing ploy more than an actual sale product. not many people could afford that price for their CPU let alone the extra gear needed for it.