Red Meat For Enthusiasts
The other big development from Intel will be
Ivy Bridge-E. If you bought an LGA2O11 board because that’s the socket for real
enthusiasts.’ you’ve probably been feeling a Little forlorn as of Late. After all,
LGA2O11 is still rolling a CPU with Intel’s older 32nm Sandy Bridge cores.
Sure, you get six of them, and a boat Load of PCIe lanes that LGA1155 can only
dream of but where’s the Love, Intel?
That love should come, umm, sometime next year
the latest word is Q3 2013. Ivy Bridge-E is what you’d expect: six [or maybe
eight cores of 22nm Ivy Bridge action. It was originally predicted for late 2012,
so why the delay? Our guess is it’s because Intel just doesn’t have any
competition at the high end. Even the older Sandy Bridge-E will mop the floor
with AMDs eight-core chips, so why push it?
The
other big development from Intel will be Ivy Bridge-E
The good news is that IVB-E should slot right
into your LGA2O11 board without issue. After that, however, LGA2011 will
probably be shuffled off to make room for a new chip and socket.
The Coming Of Vishera
On paper, and’s bulldozer microarchitecture
always sounded Like a mean, green machine. When it Landed Last year. Though, in
the form of the Zambezi processor (aka FX-8150), it actually went about as fast
as a real life bulldozer.
AMD didn’t just give up and curl into a ball,
though. The company went back to work polishing the FX chip into the new AMD
FX-8350 ‘Vishera. The chip might Look Like a Zambezi, but it features an
improved branch predictor, improved scheduler, a Larger Li translate Lookaside
buffer, new FMA3 and F16C instructions, L2 improvements, and many other
changes.
The best feature of Vishera. Though, is its
backward compatibility. Vishera should work with most, if not all, AM3+ boards
with a BIOS update, and AMD is promising that future CPUs will work with AM3+ As
Well.
Enter The Test Bed
To see how Vishera stacks up. We used the same
Asus Cross-hair V board that we used to test Bulldozer more than a year ago and
outfitted it with a GeForce GTX 580 - 8GB of dual-channel 00R3/1600, an OCZ
Vertex 3 SSD and Windows 8. Why Windows 8? One issue that cropped up with the
original Bulldozer chip was that Windows 7’s scheduler didn’t know how to deal
with the Bulldozer’s shared multicores.
For comparison, we dusted off our old FX-8150
and set up a near identical Intel system using Intel’s Core i5-3570K on an Asus
P8Z77-V Premium motherboard with Windows 8. Why the 3570k? It’s the chip AMD
uses as a benchmark for the FX-8350 and. frankly, our recommendation for the
sweet spot of computing today.
the
new AMD FX-8350 ‘Vishera
The result? First, FX-8150 is still slow. It
could barely compete with the Core i5-2500K last year and took it on the chin
from the Ivy Bridge based Core i5-3570K in just about every test we ran. In
fact, it was so slow in our Premiere Pro CS6 encode that we had to rerun the
tests on both the Intel and FX-8150 because we couldn’t believe the results.
The FX-8350 fares far better. In fact, we’d
dare say the FX-8350 is very competitive with the 3570K in some heavily
multithreaded tasks. Take, for example, our Premiere Pro CS6 benchmark. The FX-8350
doesn’t trounce the 3570K but it cuts the encode time in half over the FX-8150
part. In other tests, Vishera aces the Ivy Bridge part.
You can’t deny the power of the individual Ivy
Bridge cores. Though. We ran Cirie bench 10 on a single core and the Ivy Bridge
slaughtered both FX CPUs. In several of the gaming benchmarks, Intel’s more
efficient cores also put Ivy Bridge on top, although we did see the FX parts
unexpectedly pull ahead in 3OMark, whereas usually there is no difference among
CPUs in this test when the same OPU is used.
What do we recommend? If your chores are
mostly Limited to gaming and tasks that can’t exploit all eight cores, the
Intel part has the advantage. If, however, you are rendering 3D or transcoding
or rendering video (except in Adobe Premiere Pro CS6I. The new FX 8350 should
be your pick. It offers a Longer socket roadmap and gives you better
performance in these areas. We do have to add, however, that the performance
gap probably isn’t as good as AMD fans would expect, considering the clock and
core count difference between the FX-8350 and Core i5-3570K. Still, for AMD
these days, a tie is probably good news considering it’s up against Intel’s
best cores to date.
