General Use Performance

We'll start out our tests with the 7-zip benchmark, a CPU bound multithreaded integer workload that looks at 7-zip compression/decompression algorithms where the IO subsystem is removed from the equation:

7-zip Benchmark

7-zip is almost the perfect scenario for AMD's Vishera: a heavily threaded integer benchmark. Here the FX-8350 is able to outperform the Core i7 3770K. In fact, all of the Vishera parts are able to outperform their price competitive Ivy Bridge alternatives. The old Core i7 920 does pretty well here thanks to its 8-thread architecture.

Next up is Mozilla's Kraken JavaScript benchmark. This test includes some forward looking js code designed to showcase performance of future rich web applications on today's software and hardware. We run the test under IE10:

Windows 8 - Mozilla Kraken Javascript Benchmark

If the 7-zip benchmark is the best case scenario for AMD, Mozilla's Kraken test is among the worst. Largely dominated by single threaded performance, the FX-8350 is significantly slower than a Core i3 3220. Only Intel's old Core i7 920 is slower here, and that's a chip that debuted in 2008.

Although not the best indication of overall system performance, the SYSMark 2012 suite does give us a good idea of lighter workloads than we're used to testing.

SYSMark 2012 - Overall

Overall performance according to SYSMark 2012 is within striking distance of Ivy Bridge, at least for the FX-8350. AMD seems to have equalled the performance of last year's 2500K, and is able to deliver almost 90% of the performance of the 3750K. It's not a win by any means, but AMD is inching closer.

SYSMark 2012 - Office Productivity

SYSMark 2012 - Media Creation

SYSMark 2012 - Web Development

SYSMark 2012 - Data/Financial Analysis

SYSMark 2012 - 3D Modeling

SYSMark 2012 - System Management

Par2 File Recovery Performance

Par2 is an application used for reconstructing downloaded archives. It can generate parity data from a given archive and later use it to recover the archive

Chuchusoft took the source code of par2cmdline 0.4 and parallelized it using Intel’s Threading Building Blocks 2.1. The result is a version of par2cmdline that can spawn multiple threads to repair par2 archives. For this test we took a 708MB archive, corrupted nearly 60MB of it, and used the multithreaded par2cmdline to recover it. The scores reported are the repair and recover time in seconds.

Par2 - Multi-Threaded par2cmdline 0.4

Crank up the threads and once again you see Vishera do quite well. The FX-8350 outpaces the Core i5 3570, and the FX-4300 falls only slightly behind the Core i3 3220.

Excel Math Performance

Microsoft Excel 2007 SP1 - Monte Carlo Simulation

Introduction Video Transcoding & Visual Studio 2012 Performance
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  • klatscho - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link

    but at least priced decently.
  • leexgx - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link

    still like how AMD think they have 8 full cores in there (some sites list the Modules not FP cores in their lists)

    8x is 4 Modules (4M/8T)
    6x is 3 Modules (3M/6T)
    4x is 2 Modules (2M/4T)

    they hardly outperform stock clocked matched cpus (that they listed)
  • leexgx - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link

    also to add if you own an Bulldozer (or Vishera) type of cpu you should all ready have these patches installed
    http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2646060
    http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2645594
  • Penti - Wednesday, October 24, 2012 - link

    There are 8 fully pipelined integer cores in there, they are just very weak. Some of it is the shared frontend/decoder some of it is the integer execution units themselves. Weak SIMD/FPU-performance isn't the only thing it got. It just does so much less. You don't have two pipelines with separate resources to achieve SMT/HT. They need wider execution here. Preferably dropping the shared front end thing too. Makes no point of having it around, focus on making it faster and dump all that cache which does no good. Mobile/Notebook chips can't really have 16MB of cache any way. Just a few MB.
  • DDR4 - Wednesday, November 7, 2012 - link

    It's just a marketing thing, the cores don't have that much power, AMD's just looking to do better than Intel in one area.
  • P39Airacobra - Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - link

    And you base this on the first that came to your mind to make you feel better about you over paying for your wimpy little 4 core Intel CPU with half the power of a FX-8320. LOL
  • P39Airacobra - Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - link

    Just kidding I have a i5 myself, But guys you really should stop being such fanboys. AMD has a great Chip here with the FX-8320 and FX-8350. They are priced much lower than the top i5 CPU, And they will perform just as well in gaming if not better. And who cares about it using 125 watts? 125 watts is a bit more than what Intel's i5's use , But it can still be ran more than fine with a High end GPU with just a decent 600watt mainstream PSU like a CX600.
  • spooky2th - Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - link

    Intel i5's can handle faster memory than any amp chip. They have a stronger MC plus they OC very well too. With the 1155 socket the amd chips were barely keeping up. Since haswell the speed champs are intel cpu's hands down and with the z97 boards and the new processors that will only work with the 97 boards, look out amd! Better OC'ing and handling faster memory than before!
  • DesiredUser - Friday, February 12, 2016 - link

    Currently, FX-8350 costs over $200.
    Used Xeon 5647 costs just $50 and beats a crap out of it.
    Both support ECC. Go figure.
  • Homeles - Sunday, October 28, 2012 - link

    Because performance = core count. Brilliant.

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