8 core AMD vs 8 core Intel

[dastral]

Looking to build a new desktop. Need lots of cores for the application I'm writing. How does AMD compare to Intel in terms of performance these days?

Don't be fooled, all those 8 Core you see are actually 4 Real Cores + 4 Fake Cores 🙂

AMD offers better Performance/$ under a very specific workload : encoding
Otherwise Intel is the superior choice (specially if you only use up to 4 cores).

 

[lakedude]

There are only about 3 reason to go AMD that I can think of.

1) You want to "donate" money to the corporate underdog perhaps in the hopes of helping to ensure a competitive market.

2) You want low initial cost, you have an app that can make use of MOAR COARS, and you don't care about power consumption.

3) You want a low initial cost all around PC that you don't want to ever put a real video card in, like a HTPC with a the ability to do some light gaming. AMD's APUs are pretty good for this sort of thing. Same goes for their laptop APUs so long as battery life isn't a critical issue.

However if you want the best performance, or care about power consumption or battery life, Intel rulz at the moment. Actually they have for some time now.

I do wish AMD was in a better spot but the truth is that they are behind and have been for a while. Nothing wrong with an AMD for general use if you can find one one cheap.

 

[jhu]

Don't be fooled, all those 8 Core you see are actually 4 Real Cores + 4 Fake Cores 🙂

AMD offers better Performance/$ under a very specific workload : encoding
Otherwise Intel is the superior choice (specially if you only use up to 4 cores).

Agreed, I think the horse is still twitching a little bit...

AMD's marketing department did a good job convincing most of the world that a thread context that delivers only 54% more throughput deserves to be called a "core".

 

[OCGuy]

Since intel doesn't make a consumer 8-core cpu, im assuming you may also be interested in xeons and opterons:

here is a review that may interest you.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6508/the-new-opteron-6300-finally-tested

Haswell-E will have a 8-core processor.

Although price/performance ratio at that point would be tossed out the window.

Grab a 4670 or an i7 for the HT and you'll be good to go for quite a while.

 

[dguy6789]

Don't be fooled, all those 8 Core you see are actually 4 Real Cores + 4 Fake Cores 🙂

How do you figure that? AMD's FX processors don't lose much individual thread performance when going from 1 thread to 8 threads in a highly parallel application. 4 real + 4 fake is a better way to describe Intel's approach.

 

[ShintaiDK]

How do you figure that? AMD's FX processors don't lose much individual thread performance when going from 1 thread to 8 threads in a highly parallel application. 4 real + 4 fake is a better way to describe Intel's approach.

That depends on the CPU load type. Plus they do lose performance due to the scaling issue when above 4.

So, 4 FPUs, 8 INT that loses ~20% per core when above 4 threads.

AMDs biggest mistake was to call it 8 cores. Had they called it quadcore with CMT then it would have been much more positive recieved than it was.

 

[jhu]

How do you figure that? AMD's FX processors don't lose much individual thread performance when going from 1 thread to 8 threads in a highly parallel application. 4 real + 4 fake is a better way to describe Intel's approach.

See what I linked above. A true core should be much closer to 100% more throughput per thread. A Bulldozer/Piledriver module has an average of 50% more throughput for the second thread on that module.

 

[tareqjj]

Intel cores are much better performance and efficiency wise.

 

[netxzero64]

in the end, no point in getting AMD as they are way behind intel as of the moment. I lost my faith with them when bulldozer came out and bulldozed itself to hell.

 

[dastral]

in the end, no point in getting AMD as they are way behind intel as of the moment

Newegg sells FX8350 for 199$, while i7-4770K costs 330$
All things being equal, if you do encoding or some weird stuff like BF4-64p AMD probably offers better bang per buck.

Funny part is if you consider Jhu's link : http://blog.stuffedcow.net/2014/01/amd-modules-hyperthreading/

HT offers +25% while Modules offer +60% however....
As an "Intel Core" is much much faster than an AMD core , lets say 60%
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6396/the-vishera-review-amd-fx8350-fx8320-fx6300-and-fx4300-tested/4

That "25% of an intel core" equals to "40% of an AMD core".
So it's not as lopsided as you might think (i don't know if my idea is easy to understand).

So you end up with something like

i7 : 4x Intel Cores + 4x 40% of an AMD Core
FX : 4x Amd Cores + 4x 60% of an AMD Core

 

[Rakehellion]

Looking to build a new desktop. Need lots of cores for the application I'm writing. How does AMD compare to Intel in terms of performance these days?

If you need lots of cores, then wouldn't it perform better on the GPU?

 

[ShintaiDK]

If you need lots of cores, then wouldn't it perform better on the GPU?

GPUs are very limited in functionality. And then, even if it could run, it could potentially be extremely slow and irrelevant that way.

 

[davie jambo]

I've got an i7 4770 paired with a HD7970 and an FX8320 paired with the same card

on your 3d games frames are pretty close , with the i7 winning but not by much , maybe ten frames tops. On games like Civ 5 the i7 wins by some margin

So I'd say if you've got plenty money go for intel

 

[bepo]

Newegg sells FX8350 for 199$, while i7-4770K costs 330$
All things being equal, if you do encoding or some weird stuff like BF4-64p AMD probably offers better bang per buck.

To be fair there are better deals to be had on Intel CPU's. Microcenter has the 4670k for $180 and the 4770k at $240. Those blow away the FX8350 which is also $180 at Microcenter.

 

[jhu]

HT offers +25% while Modules offer +60% however....
As an "Intel Core" is much much faster than an AMD core , lets say 60%
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6396/the-vishera-review-amd-fx8350-fx8320-fx6300-and-fx4300-tested/4

Looking at the Povray results for the FX8350, it looks like the second thread of each module has 47% of the performance of a full core (or put another way, 2 threads on 1 module has 76% of the performance as 2 threads on 2 modules).

That "25% of an intel core" equals to "40% of an AMD core".
So it's not as lopsided as you might think (i don't know if my idea is easy to understand).

So you end up with something like

i7 : 4x Intel Cores + 4x 40% of an AMD Core
FX : 4x Amd Cores + 4x 60% of an AMD Core

Again, going by Povray, each Intel core is actually 120% of an AMD module, clock for clock. Each second thread on the Intel core is 15% of a full core. So if we use AMD modules as the baseline, clock for clock:

i7: 4 Intel cores + 4 extra threads = 6 single-threaded AMD modules
FX: 4 modules + 4 extra threads = 6 single-threaded AMD modules

 

[mnewsham]

Those blow away the FX8250 which is also $180 at Microcenter.

The FX8320 is $100 at microcenter in store right now.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Intel will beat the AMD hands down. In performance. The AMD has a better cost.

 

[apsbob]

Looking to build a new desktop. Need lots of cores for the application I'm writing. How does AMD compare to Intel in terms of performance these days?

Intel performs better.

 

[eternalone]

Buy intel right now, it probably wont be getting any better for AMD until about 2016 after they abandon Bulldozer architecture because even the new Kaveri steamroller cores cant come close to Intels Haswell or Phenoms 2's performance.

 

[TeknoBug]

I've sworn by AMD since the 486 days with a few Intel systems in between (like some Pentium Pro, 2 & 3, crazy dual Celeron 533MHz @ 1.1GHz setup) but I'm glad I switched to Intel for gaming over a year ago, Intel is just much better in overall gaming- even if benchmarks shows ~5fps differences, you'll feel the difference during actual gameplay in some games (smoothness per se).

 

[jhu]

I've sworn by AMD since the 486 days with a few Intel systems in between (like some Pentium Pro, 2 & 3, crazy dual Celeron 533MHz @ 1.1GHz setup) but I'm glad I switched to Intel for gaming over a year ago, Intel is just much better in overall gaming- even if benchmarks shows ~5fps differences, you'll feel the difference during actual gameplay in some games (smoothness per se).

Read the original post. He doesn't say he's gaming. He's writing writing multithreaded applications. With regard to this, performance should be about the same. The AMD chip, however, will have higher power consumption.

 

[Emulex]

how does the scheduler know to keep the pair's of cores (1 shared FP) from stalling? (which o/s?) is it like HT where the o/s knows to not prefer to use those cores unless absolutely necessary?

 

[OCGuy]

Read the original post. He doesn't say he's gaming. He's writing writing multithreaded applications. With regard to this, performance should be about the same. The AMD chip, however, will have higher power consumption.

?? AMD 8-core is well behind Intel's i5 i7 quad-cores, even without HT.

It only gets uglier when you throw two more cores on the i7. Haswell-E octo will just be spiking the football.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/697?vs=995

 

[jhu]

?? AMD 8-core is well behind Intel's i5 i7 quad-cores, even without HT.

It only gets uglier when you throw two more cores on the i7. Haswell-E octo will just be spiking the football.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/697?vs=995

See my post above. At full threads, AMD 4 module performs similar to Intel 4 core+ht. .

Now if we talk about real AMD 8-core (Opteron 6380) vs. Intel 8-core (Xeon E5-4602 v2), the Intel one will beat the AMD one definitively, not least of which is because the Opteron is using NUMA, but the Xeon doesn't need to.

 

[OCGuy]

Dont need to look at anything other than the very expansive AT CPU comparison that was linked, which supports and validates the current market distribution.

No need to isolate one benchmark when the time was taken to compile so many. 😉