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Would you buy a Steamroller/Excavator based AMD FX CPU if it existed today?

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Abwx said:
Thanks for the numbers, that s very valuable info, power under CB R15 is comparable to CB 11.5, the VID seems quite accurate in respect of real voltage, your CPU TDP was barely 98W at peak...
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For whatever it is worth, I'm using a 1300 watt power supply. 120 - 240 watt loads aren't it's most efficient areas. Jonnyguru.com tested this unit and it wasn't bad at low loads, but I'm sure with a proper power supply and some tweaking I could get this system to sip power. My idle is higher than most because I have four 200mm fans over my radiator and a decent sized pump. With undervolting a small AIO cooler would be sufficient, easily.

I know you're more interested in the power delta, but just wanted to mention that I think a 4.2-4.4GHz four module FX that sips power is probably very possible if you're willing to adjust settings and buy the right parts.

Right now I run my system at 5.130GHz (223x23). That isn't really pushing too hard, it is a good compromise between speed and power use, relatively speaking. But I think I can get really good performance with an underclock and ~4.4GHz clocks with an aggressive turbo on a single module if I wanted, too.

Lots of options for an enthusiast with these CPU's. 🙂
 
WT said:
Would I ?? Hell yea !! I'm TRYING to buy one, but finding the real issue is finding a good 970 board that offers 8+2 phase power. The crap boards that seem to be everywhere are offering 4+1 which means you can't OC any chip worth a damn.

Using a 965BE, and while it is fine for what I use it for, the urge to upgrade is getting stronger.
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What's your budget?

Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3P - $65 after rebate.

MSI 970 Gaming - $90 And a fairly new-ish board.
 
blake0812 said:
Only if the Dolphin emulator utilized it properly unlike the current FX chips.
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It's not that Dolphin doesn't utilize FX chips properly, but rather that programmers haven't yet been able to reduce dependence on the speed of the primary thread. An Intel chip with many slow cores (e.g. 18 core Xeon) would be equally inappropriate for Dolphin.
 
SlowSpyder said:
What's your budget?

Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3P - $65 after rebate.
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:thumbsup: Nice find !! I looked at that a few weeks ago and there was no rebate on it at the time. It's the only board I have found that gets good reviews and allows the 8350 to be safely overclocked.

I was trying to stay under $50 for a used board, but why bother when I can get a (better) new board for $15 more ?? Thanks for the link, SS !!
 
Yuriman said:
It's not that Dolphin doesn't utilize FX chips properly, but rather that programmers haven't yet been able to reduce dependence on the speed of the primary thread. An Intel chip with many slow cores (e.g. 18 core Xeon) would be equally inappropriate for Dolphin.
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Sounds like a bad Dolphin case.
 
MLSCrow said:
Just curious as to just who, out there, would actually purchase an AMD CPU if they were to create an 8-core (quad module) FX series based on the Steamroller or Excavator architectures.

I'm still running a Phenom II 955BE@4.0, and am in the market to upgrade and most likely going with a 4970K, but, honestly, if there were an updated FX, I would probably give it a go. Just seeing if anyone else would.
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Do you know about the new processors from AMD known as K12?
 
why won't amd do something like: first 2 cores extremely high ipc, then rest are high MT/lots of cores. Kinda like the turbo idea but further. Obviously if they could make high ipc core they probably would though 😛
 
lyssword said:
why won't amd do something like: first 2 cores extremely high ipc, then rest are high MT/lots of cores. Kinda like the turbo idea but further. Obviously if they could make high ipc core they probably would though 😛
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Making the cores asymmetric is a bad idea if you look at the cell processor for instance ...

As for the topic, no I would likely not buy Steamroller or Excavator just for the simple virtue that they do not fulfill their roles as a CPU very well. Until I can see AMD matching Sandy Bridge with Excavator clock for clock (Which is unlikely given AMD's history.) I will not consider any of their offerings.

Since Excavator seems like a lost cause I also have some doubts that Zen's microarchitecture will be able to match Intel's Sandy Bridge clock for clock and even if it does they would need to add hardware transactional memory support along the lines of something like Intel's TSX or their long proposed ASF extension for me to even consider buying an AMD CPU again.

I couldn't give a damn if Zen didn't support AVX-512 since it's highly unlikely that there will be any worthwhile gains in extracting more instruction level parallelism.
 
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