AMD Launches First 'Vishera' FX CPUs, Includes 8-core FX-8350 at 4GHz

[Rob Williams]

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.

Read through the rest of our post and then discuss it here!

[Kougar]

I have to admit... I am surprised. Single-threaded performance still sucks out the wazoo, but taking into account its given price points AND heavy-threaded workloads... Vishera is actually competitive. Intel still has the fastest parts, but AMD finally has something price-competitive with the midrange Core i5's again. They are still losing heavily out on idle/load power consumption though.

[Kougar]

I went and said that, but I just realized I completely mis-calculated the power consumption costs.

There's a 20-25watt difference at idle, and a 75-95watt difference under load when comparing the FX-8350 to the 3770K depending on whose website you read. The US average kWh rate is 12 cents (CA seems to average higher). The following uses the 12 cent kWr rate and that the system is left running the entire year.

25w @ Idle: $26.28
95w @ Load: $99.86

To clarify, the above figures are how much extra you would pay per year in electricity if you bought an 8350 instead of the 3770K. Obviously in my case since I run F@H year-round, paying the extra $$ for a 3770K would pay for itself ~1.5 years, and that's ignoring the much higher performance it would give.

[Merlin]

I'm always concerned about the heat from the AMD processors. One machine that I built was laden with heat.

[DarkStarr]

>.> AMD desktop heat? I had a 955BE and it ran cool as hell. Only around 55C overclocked and max temp on 955BEs is 62C. My 2600k at 4.8 on air would hit mid 70c. Anyways the new AMD cpus seem to be fairly good. They have a decent competitive chip on their hands but the big thing is base clock is 4Ghz vs the 3770k at 3.5Ghz.

[Rob Williams]

Originally Posted by Kougar

To clarify, the above figures are how much extra you would pay per year in electricity if you bought an 8350 instead of the 3770K. Obviously in my case since I run F@H year-round, paying the extra $$ for a 3770K would pay for itself ~1.5 years, and that's ignoring the much higher performance it would give.

Thanks a lot for doing the math... that is very interesting. Especially for Folders, it makes sense to opt for the beefier chip when it means the power consumption is lower. And when you put it in this sort of perspective, it goes to show just how much it actually matters that power consumption is lower on Intel's chips.

[Kougar]

Well I realized I didn't have a clear idea of what the difference in power consumption would mean, and lets face it... AMD's Vishera is competitive in all other respects. I got the math wrong about a dozen times, but I finally got the right results after finding a calculator that jived with my excel table results.

The problem for AMD is that my numbers were for the i7 3770K. The FX-8350 competes directly against the i5 3570, which actually offers 20 watts lower power draw than the 3770K I reference.

If a person turns their computer off at night and doesn't usually run intensive workloads constantly then AMD's FX-8350 is still a better buy at its price point, and the power differences won't amount to very much. But again Vishera is an eight-core chip... it would be a little unusual to recommend an eight-core chip for someone that hardly uses their PC!