FRONTPAGE Rumor: AMD FX-8350 -Piledriver- to Launch in Q3

According to the website Hexus.net, AMD is preparing Piledriver CPUs sometime in August. This is welcome news for AMD fans who have pretty much dispaired since Bulldozer debuted last year. It wasn’t a bad CPU per se’, but compared with Ivy Bridge, it’s just not competitive.

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i hoping piledriver will work on my Mobo

If this goes over well, I may be getting rid of my 1100T.

If not, we may not see much more of AMD's processors.

Edit: Trekky, it should. PD is supposed to be on the same AM3+ as BD. Should be compatible with a BIOS flash.

Shouldn't it be compared to Sandy Bridge instead of Ivy?

I think this one, PD, should compare with IVB, instead of BD with IVB.

Yep, Piledriver is supposed to be AM3+ compatible.

EDIT - Txus, it was compared to Sandy in its review; I was referring to what's out on the market currently.

10% higher Clocks and (Hexus Quoted) 6% + IPC will put the FX-8350 on par with Thuban at best.
That's not good enough.

I hope Hexus are wrong and Toms Hardware are right.

Yea, I meant the first lines. That could confuse someone.

Frakk said:

10% higher Clocks and (Hexus Quoted) 6% + IPC will put the FX-8350 on par with Thuban at best.
That's not good enough.

I hope Hexus are wrong and Toms Hardware are right.

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You know what, I just came across this review.
http://www.hardwareheaven.com/revie...sor-vs-core-i7-2600k-review-introduction.html

They didn't use the Formula V motherboard. The 2600k still shows higher number in a majority of the tests, but the difference is marginal for a lot of the benchmarks. Hell, the actual gaming results show a slight edge for the FX. Considering the 90 dollars difference between the two, I'm still glad I chose the AM3+ platform.

Not to mention that you can get the 8120 for even cheaper than that and still push about the same level of overclocking as the 8150. I think this will all pan out. I don't think they will be crushing Intel by any means, but I'm confident we will see a good upgrade rolling out this year.

Yea, that review is an anomaly. It was a big topic of discussion when Bulldozer came out. Basically, they ran every benchmark that the Bulldozer CPU looked good in...and few it didn't. For instance, why run GPU-bound 3DMark 11 Xtreme instead of the more normal 3DMark 11 Performance? Gaming there won't be much of a difference anyway.

I approved the CPU for a number of reasons, but its ability to keep up with a 2600K wasn't one of them. It did well at the launch price told to us and it overclocked like a banshee under LN2. When they jacked the price, it was no longer worth it relative to the competition.

Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad platform and no one should feel bad for selecting it, but that review site is kidding themselves and everybody else trying to show it is very close to just as good as Sandy Bridge.

rescuetoaster said:

You know what, I just came across this review.
http://www.hardwareheaven.com/revie...sor-vs-core-i7-2600k-review-introduction.html

They didn't use the Formula V motherboard. The 2600k still shows higher number in a majority of the tests, but the difference is marginal for a lot of the benchmarks. Hell, the actual gaming results show a slight edge for the FX. Considering the 90 dollars difference between the two, I'm still glad I chose the AM3+ platform.

Not to mention that you can get the 8120 for even cheaper than that and still push about the same level of overclocking as the 8150. I think this will all pan out. I don't think they will be crushing Intel by any means, but I'm confident we will see a good upgrade rolling out this year.

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Yes... i know about that review, its accurate if a little biased. Bulldozer Can and does get close enough to the 2600K, even beats it here and there... but the benchmarks tests in that review are favorable to bulldozer.

Most other reviewers do not add any results of benches favoring AMD, Hell most of them insist on using Sandra and Super PI.

it would be no good dismissing Sandra results as irrelevant in the real world, as AMD do for apparently good reason, people still look at it and make decisions based on the results.

Personally i would like to see more balanced reviews, Not Hardware Heaven balanced.... as that goes to far the other way for me.

I would like to see them drop the (favored benchmarking software) concept all together. as most of them are geared one way or the other, they just don't tell a true story.

Why not concentrate on a whole range of real life apps, like Toms did to a limited extent in my link, we would get a far more useful and accurate picture then.

I think personally I'm just going to stick to Intel these days.

I went AMD awhile in the late 90's, and really don't see going back there myself in the future.

I personally stopped reading Tom's about 10 years ago I guess too,(might just seem that way probably more like 5+) I always saw silly things going on there I suppose, about as much for getting a laugh sometimes as reading some of the Eggs reviews now and then hehe.

Why I'm an OCF member I guess.

*shrug*

This news is supposed to be making me feel all moist and tingly down there..in my liver
But unlike Justin Bieber to preteen girls, I'm just not feeling the news, 10% isn't enough for me because the performance is comparable to a Phenom. I bet the power consumption and heat generation didn't go down either.

Oh and AMD made a whole fiasco out of the bulldozer release, misquoting specs, publishing a classic 1970's comic laughing at intel, discontinuing the higher end Thubans (the last move did not inspire confidence).

buffalowings said:

Oh and AMD made a whole fiasco out of the bulldozer release, misquoting specs, publishing a classic 1970's comic laughing at intel, discontinuing the higher end Thubans (the last move did not inspire confidence).

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I would go as far as to say the FX CPU is a failure so great it might even rival that of Microsofts' Windows Vista(R). When AMD said bulldozer, they meant it. Can move a lot of earth, but its big, clunky and power hungry and slow.

I cant see the piledriver doing much to help. Time to go back to the drawing board with a completely new CPU design geared for performance and get rid of the modules my god.

After all, a Bulldozer 'core' isnt as capable as a Phenom II core, for starters each Phenom II core can fetch and decode work and doesnt have to share its floating point capabilities with anything else. The BD module shares everything in sight, the floating point unit, front end, Level 2 cache.
Its a bad design, and a tragic failure.

If bulldozer was vista, and they release piledriver as an improvment, doesnt that make it windows 7, so it will be a smash hit

storm-chaser said:

I would go as far as to say the FX CPU is a failure so great it might even rival that of Microsofts' Windows Vista(R). When AMD said bulldozer, they meant it. Can move a lot of earth, but its big, clunky and power hungry and slow.

I cant see the piledriver doing much to help. Time to go back to the drawing board with a completely new CPU design geared for performance and get rid of the modules my god.

After all, a Bulldozer 'core' isnt as capable as a Phenom II core, for starters each Phenom II core can fetch and decode work and doesnt have to share its floating point capabilities with anything else. The BD module shares everything in sight, the floating point unit, front end, Level 2 cache.
Its a bad design, and a tragic failure.

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SHHhhhhhhush monkey, you're making BD have a low self esteem.. we don't like to refer to her weight issues..she's got so much on her plate, and so much carrying capacity already, but not much fork...

Here we go again with AMD. Rumors upon rumors followed by delays upon delay. AMD should take a lesson or two from Intel. Sometimes it is best to STFU, promise little and deliver more. Where's Trinity for the masses? Notice when IB was released it was generally on time and is available everywhere.

Common AMD, get your house in order, deliver what you promise and start innovating again. Otherwise there will continue to be people like me who bought Intel again after buying only AMD since socket A days.

Guys,...


Ivy Bridge is not what it was cracked up to be, the thing is on average 4% faster than Sandy Bridge and most of that is down to slightly higher clocks, and your talking about heat? Ivy Bridge belts out more heat than its predecessor and is a pig to overclock compared with that predecessor.

Intel's Pentium 4, don't get me started on that, that thing was a bigger failure than Bulldozer.

Bulldozer is not what was expected from it, just like the P4 and to some extent Ivy Bridge, Sandy Bridge is just plainly a better CPU.

No company is infallible, certainly not Intel so don't pretend they are. Everyone is entitled to make mistakes here and there as long as they put those mistakes right in the end.

Piledriver uses a lot less power than Bulldozer, that much is already obvious, that's also a good indication it will run much cooler, performance is also up, it might not be much higher than Thuban but its moving forward non the less, all that's progress no mater what way you chose to look at it.

Also Bulldozer is not a bad chip, it can beat a more expensive 2600K in some aspects, it just needs more work, AMD have about 2% of Intel's revenue, its hellish impressive what they can do with that tiny revenue, don't you think?

And last, your getting way ahead of yourselves, it has not been properly tested yet, sh#t the FX-8350 has not been tested at all yet....

Also, Windows (which the majority of people run on BD) doesn't load balance the CPU right. The OS needs to catch up to the new architecture now. And PD should use the same load balancing, so as soon as that is figured out, it will be a whole new ballgame.

Frakk said:

Guys,...
Bulldozer is not what was expected from it, just like the P4 and to some extent Ivy Bridge, Sandy Bridge is just plainly a better CPU.

No company is infallible, certainly not Intel so don't pretend they are. Everyone is entitled to make mistakes here and there as long as they put those mistakes right in the end.

Piledriver uses a lot less power than Bulldozer, that much is already obvious, that's also a good indication it will run much cooler, performance is also up, it might not be much higher than Thuban but its moving forward non the less, all that's progress no mater what way you chose to look at it.

Also Bulldozer is not a bad chip, it can beat a more expensive 2600K in some aspects, it just needs more work, AMD have about 2% of Intel's revenue, its hellish impressive what they can do with that tiny revenue, don't you think?

And last, your getting way ahead of yourselves, it has not been properly tested yet, sh#t the FX-8350 has not been tested at all yet....

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No, AMD is getting ahead of itself, not us. The reason the FX-8350 has not been tested yet is because it DOESNT exist. Its on some flow chart and thats as far as they got. Ink on paper. Its another marketing ploy to make us "believe" there is something better out there to keep the AMD fanboys happy. But it wont be produced, and it wont make it to production, because AMD has seen what a failure the FX-8150 is.

Also, the Bulldozer is a BAD chip. It outperforms the 2600k (4 cores mind you, vs 8) in about TWO benchmarks in the history of benchmarking. Heck the 2500 ownes it hard just the same. BD is power hungry shares just about everything in sight and uses modules that remind me of the core2quad days. I mean wtf they make 16 server CPUs how hard is it to make an 8 core desktop cpu. They should have just shrunk down the Phenom II Zomsa die to 32nm, added two additional CPUs and a 2166

Ivy bridge is not a failure it just has less material under the heatsink to dissipate heat, verses the Sandy Bridge. Ivy bridge performs on par with expectations and wasnt a complete flop.

Its especially sad to see that AMD has discontinued the higher end Phenom IIs. These chips outperformed the FX series, and just adds to the saddness. And on top of all that the FX world record of 8.4Ghz was set with only TWO CORES enabled. Guess the other SIX couldnt handle it. Geezzzz