My first build with an AMD FX-8350 I am hoping it will be ok for encryption

[BirdDad]

I am hoping that since it is an eight"core"(what AMD calls cores anyway) that it will be equivalent to a quad real core.
I plan to do mostly Serpent. Basically just encrypting everything to and from hard drives and am wondering if it will be okay for the task. The price was good, the motherboard and processor were cheaper than an Intel i7 quad core alone, I already have tons of memory for it from previous PC's.
I have just started installing Win 8.1 Pro onto it before I encrypt.

 

[shady28]

Interesting.

I'm not sure what the use case is for heavy use of Serpent Encryption, but for that specific use the FX-8350 is extremely good. It's also pretty good at encoding use cases where the task can be heavily threaded and equally balanced. I suppose the crypto thing falls into that category, along with WinRAR and some others.

Having said that, it's not very good at much else

 

[BirdDad]

thanks for the information.
I do my video encoding on my i7 8 core @3997MHz, memory @ 2999MHz liquid cooled of course

 

[dark zero]

Bad move. AMD has now the worst performance dollar/watt due Skylake and Haswell-E
The first since has far better performance and the 2nd since it has hexa core cpu.

Also it last way longer than AMD solution.

 

[alexruiz]

Bad move. AMD has now the worst performance dollar/watt due Skylake and Haswell-E
The first since has far better performance and the 2nd since it has hexa core cpu.

Also it last way longer than AMD solution.

Do you have numbers to back it up?
The OP for a specific task, encrypting and encoding.
Shady28 already showed numbers backing up the pick.
Can you do the same?

 

[dark zero]

Ok, as for Haswell-E here I send this:

And here is as for TrueCrypt

The difference is abysmal in any aspects!

Despite it cost 390 dollars, it has 50% more threads than it!

 

[shady28]

That's kind of extreme. That Intel chip you're talking about is $1049, without motherboard which for 2011v3 socket runs around $150 for a cheap one. The OP bought a $170 chip for which a mobo costs about $50. Those prices are from Newegg today.

I (have) an fx-8320, just don't use it much now. They are good at some very specific things, ie where floating point isn't a big factor yet very balanced and heavily threaded workloads are present. That doesn't describe most workloads in real life, but this happens to be one of them.

 

[Abwx]

ie where floating point isn't a big factor

That s not even true, that s due to the ubiquity of Cinebench, and still, Intel CPUs are not that extraordinary on this bench.

FX is obviously very strong in anything Integer and minimaly Mthreaded, but it has also respectable perfs in FP applications.

 

[BirdDad]

yes my motherboard+CPU was very cheap compared to Intel whose i7 quad CPU alone was more than what I paid for both.

 

[Ranulf]

Bad move. AMD has now the worst performance dollar/watt due Skylake and Haswell-E
The first since has far better performance and the 2nd since it has hexa core cpu.

Also it last way longer than AMD solution.

As long as he has a microcenter nearby, of course.

5820k @$300 (microcenter, $370-390 elsewhere) + $150 mobo + $100 for 16gb ram = $550

8350 @$150 (microcenter, $170 elsewhere), $100 mobo (could go cheaper $50-80 for decent 970 boards), $80 16gb ram = $330

$220 buys a lot more stuff you might want for a basic build with specific tasks in mind.

 

[h4rm0ny]

I am hoping that since it is an eight"core"(what AMD calls cores anyway) that it will be equivalent to a quad real core.
I plan to do mostly Serpent. Basically just encrypting everything to and from hard drives and am wondering if it will be okay for the task. The price was good, the motherboard and processor were cheaper than an Intel i7 quad core alone, I already have tons of memory for it from previous PC's.
I have just started installing Win 8.1 Pro onto it before I encrypt.

For encryption / decryption, it's not the number of cores you are looking for. This WOULD be relevant and technically could be, but it is nothing compared to what you really care about, which is whether the processor has built-in hardware support for encryption. Which the 8350 does. I swapped out an 1100T for an 8350 because despite the raw performance in most areas being pretty close (certainly too close to justify a new chip), the 8350 has AES support built in (a common encryption algorithm) whilst the 1100T it was replacing did not. I don't now recall how much difference it made in terms of hard numbers (I did benchmark but don't think I kept the results), but it was very large. I needed it to preserve performance on a BitLocker drive.

So basically, check what features the chip supports rather than the number of cores. Encryption is one of those areas where this is very significant. If you're using AES (which is probable), then an 8350 will be a good choice in this regard.


EDIT: This may be more information than you want, but check here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set There's an extension to the x86 instruction set (AES instructions) and this page lists some processors that have support for that. Most modern and standard encryption software makes use of this instruction set. I don't know specifically about Serpent but if your interest is encryption don't buy a chip that doesn't include AES support. You may have to dig a little into the information about a chip as it's esoteric enough that companies don't always stick it very prominently in their advertising and not all technical review sites would mention it. Generally newer chips (AMD or Intel) will have it.

 

[SlowSpyder]

Bad move. AMD has now the worst performance dollar/watt due Skylake and Haswell-E
The first since has far better performance and the 2nd since it has hexa core cpu.

Also it last way longer than AMD solution.

From what I see posted, the FX 8350 looks like it would offer pretty good bang for the buck for the OP's specific use.

 

[dark zero]

As long as he has a microcenter nearby, of course.

5820k @$300 (microcenter, $370-390 elsewhere) + $150 mobo + $100 for 16gb ram = $550

8350 @$150 (microcenter, $170 elsewhere), $100 mobo (could go cheaper $50-80 for decent 970 boards), $80 16gb ram = $330

$220 buys a lot more stuff you might want for a basic build with specific tasks in mind.

Agreed. If the use is pure integer apps, he has the point to go to AMD only since is cheaper. But in the professional apps, Intel crushes AMD.

 

[BirdDad]

Newegg's description of my processor:
AES - Advanced Encryption Standard increases performance on encryption apps like TrueCrypt® and PCMark®

 

[jhu]

I am hoping that since it is an eight"core"(what AMD calls cores anyway) that it will be equivalent to a quad real core.
I plan to do mostly Serpent. Basically just encrypting everything to and from hard drives and am wondering if it will be okay for the task. The price was good, the motherboard and processor were cheaper than an Intel i7 quad core alone, I already have tons of memory for it from previous PC's.
I have just started installing Win 8.1 Pro onto it before I encrypt.

How time critical is all this encryption going to be? ie can run all night or is there a specific time deadline?

 

[h4rm0ny]

Newegg's description of my processor:
AES - Advanced Encryption Standard increases performance on encryption apps like TrueCrypt® and PCMark®

Yes, that's what I'm talking about. Assuming what you want is to have your local harddrive(s) encrypted, this processor is fine. You'll see a minor performance hit on SSD's with encryption (but all chips will have this) and a smaller performance hit on HDs (because SSDs are faster than HDs the time taken to encrypt / decrypt is more of a factor with SSDs - like doing a crossword whilst waiting for a bus, as opposed to whilst waiting for... something that arrives more quickly than a bus). In short, if it hasn't been said four times already which it has - your FX-8350 is fine for encryption / decryption. Just don't use some weird and esoteric encryption algorithm that no-one has ever heard of.

Agreed. If the use is pure integer apps, he has the point to go to AMD only since is cheaper. But in the professional apps, Intel crushes AMD.

The above statement is meaningless. The distinction between "professional apps" and other software is that "professional apps" make more use of floating point calculations? So my free and simple bit of software which analyses radio signals for patterns is a "professional app" and Microsoft Word isn't? 7zip (one of the best compression tools on the market) is not a professional app but my home written tool to do amateur database profiling is? You're talking uninformed gibberish. Different natures of problem require different approaches - it has next to nothing to do with one being "professional" and the other not.

 

[h4rm0ny]

Ok, as for Haswell-E here I send this:



And here is as for TrueCrypt

The difference is abysmal in any aspects!

That makes it look pretty good to me - which is unsurprising due to the high number of cores and that this task doesn't have a great need for non-integer calculations. Your chart puts the FX-8350 up in the top third of the graph alongside the i7-4820K for example. Also, to reinforce my point about this not being some simple answer, TrueCrypt is a bad example. Aside from having exploded last year in a mess of conspiracy theories, it doesn't, iirc, make use of hardware acceleration which nearly all modern and maintained encryption software does. Meaning this isn't a realistic case for what the OP is likely to be doing.

 

[Essence_of_War]

I plan to do mostly Serpent.

Newegg's description of my processor:
AES - Advanced Encryption Standard increases performance on encryption apps like TrueCrypt® and PCMark®

I'm pretty sure that the AES-NI instruction sets only accelerate performance of Rijndael encryption. Serpent is not Rijndael, the AES winner, which the AES-NI instruction sets are written to accelerate. Performance may still be very good, you can read about some performance analysis here:

https://www.schneier.com/paper-aes-performance.pdf

On a Pentium Pro (super old) Serpent can encrypt/decrypt at about 200 cycles / byte for small sizes and asymptotically approaches 56 cycles/byte for very large numbers of bytes. As a worst case scenario, assuming no improvement in IPC over the Pentium Pro, that is still:

4*10^9 cycles/second (1 byte / 56-200 cycles) * (1 MB / (1024 Byte*1024 Byte) ~ 20-70 MB/s

Edit: On a side note, is there any reason you're not using AES? With AES-NI instructions, AES encryption is effectively completely transparent (up to like 700 MB/s).

 

[Headfoot]

Edit: On a side note, is there any reason you're not using AES? With AES-NI instructions, AES encryption is effectively completely transparent (up to like 700 MB/s).

Was going to ask the same thing. AES-NI is hardware accelerated on some newer chips so if its easy to switch that would definitely be the way to go

 

[Essence_of_War]

Was going to ask the same thing. AES-NI is hardware accelerated on some newer chips so if its easy to switch that would definitely be the way to go

Especially since it sounds like the OP chose their chip explicitly because it supported AES instructions, to then decide that they're going to be using a different encryption algorithm for a use-case where throughput is important seems...sort of strange?

 

[BirdDad]

I tried it last night and it is acceptable performance wise.

 

[BirdDad]

The AES encryption takes just as long to encrypt as Twofish or Serpent in Truecrypt(even when they are cascaded). So so much for "hardware accelerated" AES encryption.

 

[sm625]

What we need is a frames per dollar or hashes per dollar type benchmark.

 

[Essence_of_War]

The AES encryption takes just as long to encrypt as Twofish or Serpent in Truecrypt(even when they are cascaded). So so much for "hardware accelerated" AES encryption.

Are you, by any chance, seeing average speeds of ~100 MB/s and/or did you happen to watch task manager or top while you were doing it?

As I pointed out above, a single modern CPU core can brute force Twofish fast enough to not bottleneck a single spinning disk. I just tried creating large encrypted volumes (~10 GB) on my desktop and both AES and Twofish had the same average speed (~100 MB/s) when creating a large volume, but Twofish completely loaded a CPU core, while I was basically idling while using AES.

My guess is that AMD isn't lying about what instruction sets their CPU can execute, and that your AES encryption IS hardware accelerated, but you're bottle-necked by spinner IO.

 

[BirdDad]

I am judging by the time it takes to encrypt a 4TB hard drive
AES took over 7 hours
Twofish cascaded with Sepent took 7 hours but seemed to finish first.
These were tested on 7200RPM drives NAS drives. I did time it. they said 6 hours but took 7 both of them.