AMD Set To Announce New FX Processors
by Brett Howse on August 26, 2014 8:00 AM ESTDuring the 30 Years of Graphics & Gaming Innovation celebration on the weekend, AMD took the opportunity to announce several new models of FX Processors that will be coming to market soon. The new models announced are the FX-8320E, the FX-8370, and the FX-8370E. The E at the end represents a lower TDP than the normal model.
As this was not a true product launch, details were light, but based on previous releases of the FX processors we should be able to make some assumptions. The turbo clock speed was announced as 4.0 GHz for the FX-8230E which is the same as the older FX-8320 which is 3.5 GHz as a base, so we can assume the base clock will be 3.5 GHz. The FX-8370 and FX-8370E are new to the product lineup however, with an announced boost speed of 4.3 GHz for both. No base clock speed was revealed for these processors though, but the previously announced FX-8350 comes in at a base of 4.0 GHz, so the higher model number should be slightly higher than that.
AMD FX CPU Comparison | ||||||
FX- 8320 |
FX- 8320E |
FX- 8350 |
FX- 8370 |
FX- 8370E |
FX- 9590 |
|
Release Date | October 2012 | August 2014 | October 2012 | August 2014 | August 2014 | June 2013 |
Modules | 4 | |||||
L1 Cache (Code) | 256 KB | |||||
L1 Cache (Data) | 128 KB | |||||
L2 Cache | 8 MB | |||||
L3 Cache | 8 MB | |||||
TDP | 125 W | 95 W | 125 W | 125 W | 95 W | 220 W |
Base Frequency (MHz) | 3500 | 3200 | 4000 | 4000 | 3300 | 4700 |
Turbo Frequency (MHz) | 4000 | 4000 | 4200 | 4300 | 4300 | 5000 |
Core Name | Vishera | |||||
Microarchitecture | Piledriver | |||||
Socket | AM3+ | |||||
Memory Support | DDR3-1866 |
The E designation is slightly interesting. As a tradeoff for a lower TDP of 95 watts versus the 125 watts of the standard CPU, only the amount of boost time is affected. Base and boost clocks are the exactly the same as non-E chips the base clock is lowered but the Turbo clock remains the same.
The final announcements on the FX side of the presentation were to do with pricing. The FX-9590 will see a “significant” price cut this month, and AMD will now offer CPUs in a six-pack bundle to offer a lesser price per chip when bought in a relatively small volume. Whether the price cut of the FX-9590 affects the rest of the lineup is unclear, but we should know more soon.
Update:
AMD has now announced the official clock speeds for the new processors. The table has been updated with the correct info now rather than the estimated info. Unfortunately someone at the AMD had some incorrect information and the base clocks of the E series chips is in fact lower, with the Turbo clocks being the same.
Source:
AMD 30 Live
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silverblue - Tuesday, August 26, 2014 - link
I find some amusement in the complaints regarding AMD's product naming schemes. It's not as intuitive as it should be, but it could be worse. The general rule - as should be understood by now - is that the first number is the core count, the second is the generation (in odd numbers), the third is its position within the hierarchy (i.e. bigger is better) and the fourth is always a zero. It's only really the 9xxx series which has fouled things up totally. The real shame is that we don't get a 200MHz stepping per every 10 in the model number like we did with Phenom II.silverblue - Tuesday, August 26, 2014 - link
(with a general understanding that the bottom of the rung models would be 2.4GHz as they had two trailing zeroes)eachus - Tuesday, August 26, 2014 - link
"Base frequency" is mostly meaningless with modern CPUs. If the CPU is lightly loaded, you might find it running at 600 MHz or so. Fully load at least one core, and that core will jump to the "turbo" speed. What if you run all cores flat out? Depends on the instruction mix whether the processor will hit the power cap and slow down. How much will it slow down? Depends on the code you are running. I have an AMD 6-core CPU and I dedicate 4 cores to Prime95 if I am not doing other number crunching. Such as trying to get a few percent more performance out of code which fully loads the floating point cores. (How do I get more crunching? Tweaking the code to decrease L2 collisions.)Now running my fp-code for linear programming, you will top out the fp-units and put a pretty heavy load on the integer CPU portion as well, doing indexing. On an AMD CPU you might as well run the code on half the cores (and make sure to use only even or only odd) cores since that will max out both the fp units and memory access. So what is the right number for max performance? Here you have say three cores running flat out, three cores mostly in halt states, and performance is effectively gated by main memory access. (Yes, I have code that runs much faster when running with all data to and from L2. But for large arrays, you have to use main memory if only to read the data (once) and write the results. And as I said, I keep trying to reduce L2 collisions..)
Oh, and I hope AMD certs these CPUs for DDR3-2166, even though I run my memory there anyway. ;-) Or they could finally start shipping DDR4 SKUs. AFAIK, their CPUs have been DDR4 ready for at least six months, but they need someone to provide mobos.
chiechien - Tuesday, August 26, 2014 - link
New Piledriver cores? Not helping.TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, August 26, 2014 - link
hey, AMD, you know what would be much more impressive and sell way more than yet ANOTHER binned piledriver chip from 2012? AN EIGHT CORE STEAMROLLER CPU!. or a six core. built on 28nm, of course. You are not intel, you cant say "this is what consumers want" and expect people to buy it. Stop making us wait already and give us a new fx steamroller chip.silverblue - Tuesday, August 26, 2014 - link
It wouldn't work. The process is tuned more towards power savings and as such won't clock as high. If you were to overclock to at least 8350 levels, it'd probably start to use way too much power... precisely the reason why the architecture is flawed.In any case, there's not a large difference in single threaded performance, and floating point performance has, rather strangely, regressed slightly, so an FX-class chip would only make sense for multithreading, not gaming.
roadapathy - Wednesday, August 27, 2014 - link
Oh, so it's -still- 32nm wafer. Yeah. Talk about putting lipstick on a pig. Does the PR department run AMD or do they sometimes listen to the techies?Leonard Emery - Wednesday, August 27, 2014 - link
Being a big AMD fan this is kind of discouraging. No new enthusiast dekstop CPU's for years now. Just crappy refreshes and reworks of the power hungry Piledriver architecture. My next system will be X99. Farewell AMD. My wallet will never be the same....flyingpants1 - Wednesday, August 27, 2014 - link
But you knew this would happen. This is how capitalism works. What exactly do you expect them to do?East17 - Wednesday, September 3, 2014 - link
AMD will hardly stand a chance, if developers continue to use Intel's compiler and don't patch their products to stop identifying the CPU on the system and running the "most compatible" (read -much slower-) routine every time they find an AMD chip.Out of respect for their customers, software developers should offer a correctly and completely optimized product.
Intel's compiler of one of the best ones on the market and it's free. But if Intel is free not to play fair, the software developer should do his duty to his customer and offer a correctly optimized product.
I believe that AnandTech should check to see if the benchmarks used treat the processors objectively and point out to the readers the tests that involve software that runs the "most compatible" routine, each time it finds and AMD chip.