News - AMD refreshes FX Series product line with three new CPUs

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Eight cores, sub-$200 pricing and now a 95W TDP.

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Read more.

The US$199 price point for the 8370(E) is the same as the old Phenom II X6 1055T according to this April 2010 article from Anandtech. That being the case, the net effect of four years of progress is that for the same price, (and TDP), you get another two cores, more L2cache and 1GHz better peak performance. I'm sure the Intel fans will claim that this is not that impressive AMD! :(

On the other hand, £150ish for that performance bump, and it's a drop-in replacement for that four-year old processor, (or at least it will be on my Sabertooth motherboard once I get a firmware update to support the new chips). That makes it "interesting" in my book.

What I'm also very interested in is how the "lesser" 8370E performs compared to the non-E-rated part. After all, if the two chips are very close in performance then perhaps the lesser TDP would be appealing.

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Originally Posted by crossy

That being the case, the net effect of four years of progress is that for the same price, (and TDP), you get another two cores, more L2cache and 1GHz better peak performance. I'm sure the Intel fans will claim that this is not that impressive AMD! :(

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Compare the 1055T against the FX8350, I wouldn't consider the X6 for a second http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/147?vs=697
In fact I did have that exact choice with my last upgrade as that was the only X6 I could find still available. It just wasn't in the running, I ended up mulling the 8350 vs spending a load extra to go Intel.

And to be fair, Intel has been pretty stagnant apart from the Atom lines where they were playing catch-up.

If AMD can get the FX-9590 built on 28nm tech, knock it down to a 125W envelope and get it down to £100, I'll be tempted. All these different bin parts are not keeping the AM3+ platform alive. Obviously someone at AMD has worked out that moar SKUs means moar $.

AM3+ is dead. We will not see any die shrinks or improved IPC architectures on that platform

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Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix

Compare the 1055T against the FX8350, I wouldn't consider the X6 for a second

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The FX wasn't available when I bought my X6 - although in my case it was the 1090T not the 1055T - I figured that the extra expense was worth it. Actually, checking my records and it cost me £147.99 for the 1090T on 1st December 2010 from Scan, and I'm guessing that the FX8370 will probably be around the same price.

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Originally Posted by semo

If AMD can get the FX-9590 built on 28nm tech, knock it down to a 125W envelope and get it down to £100, I'll be tempted. All these different bin parts are not keeping the AM3+ platform alive. Obviously someone at AMD has worked out that moar SKUs means moar $. AM3+ is dead. We will not see any die shrinks or improved IPC architectures on that platform

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I think everyone - including AMD - sees AM3+ as "legacy", otherwise why so long between SKU announcements? AMD's CPU focus - as far as I see it - is 100% focussed on the APU's and if you don't want to buy into that combo of okay-CPU-with-great-GPU then you really need to figure on paying the Intel premium. Shame, because AMD's prime usefulness was to keep Intel cpu team on it's toes and not complacent.

yup time for a new chipset and socket with support for all the latest and greatest toys and ssd types etc. I dont care about ddr 4 as its shown to make almost no difference in games on the x99 platform and the price is horrendous atm.

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Originally Posted by crossy

because AMD's prime usefulness was to keep Intel cpu team on it's toes and not complacent.

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Yes it gave them some new ideas to copy.. sorry i mean innovate :P

Some more info about the newest FX8300 series from The Stilt(famous CPU overclocker):

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...=1#post5237937

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So it is finally the second of September...

So far I have posted a picture of a crown (which once belonged king George XII of Georgia) and hashtags #kg & #Alphabet...

#kg which stands for Kilogram
#Alphabet... "Kilo" stands for "K" in the phonetic alphabet

So what is this all about?

Everything below is highly unofficial of course as is everything else I write here.

Piledriver module based Vishera die has been mass-produced in two different die revisions since the prototyping phase.
While all of the revisions have the same major die version (OR-C0), the minor revision has changed.
Initially the first mass-produced die revision was "India" (OR-C0i, prototype and ES only), the second revision was and still is "Juliett" (OR-C0j, retail) and now finally...
The "Kilo" revision (OR-C0k) a.k.a "King Vishera" a.k.a "Vishera Type-K" has arrived.

The "King Vishera" is initially only available in the new models, FX-8370E & FX-8370.
This is most likely the case with FX-8320E also, however I have not been able to test one of them personally.
The new version is likely to be phased-in at least in the other high-end models such as FX-9590 and at some point in all of the remaining models also.
The alledged metal tapeout of the new revision (alledgedly) occured in the beginning of July. So the only way to get a newer revision part is to get one of the new models, atleast in the beginning.

The differences?

- On average 18% less leakage*1 (0-38%) for FX-8370
- On average 53% less leakage*1 (14-106%) for FX-8370E
- Up to 300MHz higher overclocking margin *12
- 100mV less voltage required for the same clocks on average *1

*1 - Compared to an average FX-8320 or FX-8350 CPU
*2 - When not restricted by the cooling or the motherboard (VRM)

The E-version is the best choice for air or water cooling thanks to the ultra low leakage characteristics.
The non E-version does the same clocks however it might require use of a higher end motherboard (with better VRM) and high-performance cooling.
The non E-version has significantly better overclockability under sub-zero temperatures (phase, LN2) since the leakage levels of the E-version are too low for the purpose.
Having an ultra low leakage characteristics is great under normal conditions however under sub-zero temperatures the voltage requirements become a issue.
Basically the low leakage part exhaust the usable range of supply voltage prior reaching it's maximum frequency.

Based on my own tests, I would estimate that >95% of FX-8370 & FX-8370E parts will reach 4.8GHz frequency in 24/7 without a custom watercooling or a ultra high-end motherboard being a requirement.
As long as the temperature (see below) stays =<65 degree C or 149 degree F and the motherboard has even remotely a sufficient VRM you'll be fine.

On a high-end motherboard and a custom watercooling 5.0G - 5.2GHz+ should be doable in 24/7 use with a good specimen.

These chips still draws a vast amount of power when overclocked so the final overclocking potential is basically just the matter of cooling.
The maximum recommended temperature during the worst case stress is 65?C tCase.

Officially the maximum tCase temperature for the various FX models is specified to:

Infra A - FR (125W TDP) - 61.1 degree C
Infra B - WM (95W TDP) - 70.5 degree C
Infra C - OL (65W TDP) - 70.3 degree C
Infra D - HO (45W TDP) - 69.1 degree C
Infra E - SJ (25W TDP) - 70.0 degree C
Infra F - FH (220W TDP) - 57.0 degree C

The tCase temperature must not be mixed with the tCTL control value sometimes dubbed as the "package temperature".
The tCase temperature is also calculated and it represents the simulated case temperature, measured from the very center of the heatspreader (see the illustration).
Neither tCase or tCTL is the actual die temperature. The actual die temperature information is not directly available on these processors. The actual die temperature is significantly higher
than the tCase or the tCTL control value indicates.



The maximum tCTL control value on all of the FX-series processors is 70 units.
When that value is reached the processor HTC logic engages and starts to reduce the power consumption and dissipation by throttling.
Some of the motherboard manufacturers (such as ASUS) alter the limit manually to reduce the chance for throttling.

So when you are talking about the temperature always use the tCase temperature instead of the tCTL control value.

Here is the examples of the wrong and right values in various monitoring softwares.

Red = Wrong (tCTL)
Green = Right (tCase)









The AOD picture also explains the value dubbed as "Thermal Margin".

Also here is a reminder why Prime95 should not be used as a reference for stability when overclocked. It results significantly higher power draw and emitted thermal than any of the most stressful real world applications.If you still find it absolutely necessary to use Prime95 for stability testing please do it this way:

Run it on only two compute units at once (set the thread count to 4 and affinity accordingly) and decrease the cooling to simulate higher power dissipation.

Only the relative Stock or OC results are comparable.

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Originally Posted by crossy

That being the case, the net effect of four years of progress is that for the same price, (and TDP), you get another two cores, more L2cache and 1GHz better peak performance. I'm sure the Intel fans will claim that this is not that impressive AMD! :(

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On the other hand, in pure CPU performance terms within the same price point, Intel haven\'t managed much more.

It\'s good to see that now the 8 core variants are now available on the 95w TDP. Should be interesting to see it against a Core i5 with the 8370E now.

So....... is it worth upgrading from my 6350 @4.5GHz, then? :undecided

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Originally Posted by Ttaskmaster

So....... is it worth upgrading from my 6350 @4.5GHz, then? :undecided

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Might be a while before we see readily available silicon at sensible prices, so I think wait and see what the real benchmarks look like. The 8370E results on Anandtech look around the 8150 level, so would take a heck of an overclock to make it sing.

I think, in every element of their business, AMD is playing the waiting game. Waiting for DDR4 to be financially viable, waiting for the next die shrink to have decent yields, waiting to see if the next generation of PCI-E is worth it - and THEN AM4 and FM3 appear. Until then, minor bumps. Fine by me; as a budget builder, the two E chips sound fantastic, seeing as the new consoles are both AMD octo-cores at their heart so multi-core compatibility in gaming should improve over the next couple of year.

The FX8320E is the same price as the FX8320:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showpr...67&subcat=1825

DDR4's big advantage is that lower power consumption (density is higher, but that's to be expected)

The other thing lurking in the background is that DDR4 is strictly point-to-point - if you add extra banks it doesn't slow the bus, because there isn't a bus anymore (this is kind of like SATA vs PATA connections)

As for pricing: At 8Gb, 2400MHz there's less than 10% difference between ddr3/4