Jun 13, 2013 1:46 PM EST
AMD may be a distant second when it comes to making x86 processors for desktops and notebooks but the company has been making some exciting moves lately. This week it announced what it describes as "the world's first commercially available 5GHz CPU processor." Meanwhile, a number of sites are now reporting benchmarks on the high-end of AMD's more mainstream processors, known as Richland, that I have found quite interesting.
The "5GHz" chip is a new version of the company's FX processor introduced at E3 earlier this week. This model, known as AMD's FX-9590, and a 4.7GHz FX-9370 both are 8-core processors, featuring the "Piledriver" architecture in which a pair of integer CPU cores share floating point and other features. They are traditional CPUs, meaning they do not have integrated graphics, unlike the company's "accelerated processing units" (APUs), which is AMD's term for a chip with both CPU and graphics features on a single die. The reason I put "5GHz" in quotes is that this apparently the top turbo speed. Until now, the x86 processor companies typically referred mainly to the base speed of the processor, and then listed a "turbo mode." For instance, the previous high-end AMD CPU, the FX-8350 was listed at 4.0GHz, with a turbo speed of 4.2GHz. The 9590 and 9370 should be faster at least in their "Max Turbo" modes, but AMD hasn't yet announced what the base speed of these new processors will be.
(Update: a number of sites are reporting this afternoon that AMD has confirmed the 9590 and the FX-9370 will have base speeds of 4.7 GHz and 4.4 GHz, respectively; and also that this will require 220 watts of power, a huge increase from the 125 watt TDP of the previous top-end chips. As a result, it will likely require special cooling and will probably be available mainly from specialty PC makers.)
Note that some specialized high-end processors such as the IBM Power series have already reached that 5GHz and beyond and we've seen previous PC processors overclocked to this speed and beyond, including from AMD. But this should be the first relatively mainstream processor to ship with official support for this clock speed. Clock speed is far from the only determinant of actual performance though; in general, Intel's higher-end Core chips have been outperforming AMD's but we'll have to wait to get real systems in to know for sure if that still holds.
Desktop Richland Benchmarked
At Computex last week, AMD announced new versions of its Richland APUs. Richland is meant to be a successor to the Trinity APUs and will mostly compete with the lower-priced version of Intel's fourth-generation Core processors, known as Haswell, also introduced last week.
In my stories last week, I said I was looking forward to seeing how Haswell and Richland would compare. Since then, a number of sites have published reviews of the desktop version of Richland, usually the 4.1GHz A10-6800K and/or the 3.8GHz A10-6700. These include Anandtech, Legit Reviews, and Tom's Hardware.
The results really don't tell much of a changed story from the comparisons of the previous generations, where AMD's Trinity went up against Intel's Ivy Bridge. In most of the tests, Richland shows a small improvement over Trinity, but nothing really special. While Haswell does come in versions with twice as many graphics units, known as HD Graphics 5000 or GT3 and even some with embedded DRAM solutions known as Iris Pro graphics, these are mostly aimed at notebook designs (with the exception of one version aimed at all-in-ones). So from Intel, the basic desktop parts still have mostly the same level of graphics as the previous generation, and the results show that as well.
Overall, Intel retains a big lead in CPU performance, even with the lower-end Core i3 and especially with the Core i7, but AMD's Richland still shows a massive lead in graphics performance, even compared with the much-more expensive Core-i7. Since on the desktop side it's pretty easy to add a discrete graphics card and a low-end discrete card seems to outperform either in graphics, this leaves Richland mostly to compete on price against a low-end Intel chip.
The more interesting comparison will be in notebooks where Intel's CPU performance lead isn't as big as it is on desktops, but it offers chips with higher-end graphics. In the previous generation, AMD had much better graphics than notebook Ivy Bridge chips, so Intel-based notebooks aimed at gamers and graphics professionals had to have discrete chips. Clearly some of that market will continue, but Intel has gotten stronger and AMD seems to have somewhat better power management in this generation. So we'll have to see real systems going head-to-head in this market.
In the end, it's hard to see Richland making a big change to the market this year. AMD's big chance should come when it releases a new architecture, known as Kaveri, planned to start manufacturing late this year, with the first systems in early 2014. This introduces an updated CPU core architecture known as "Steamroller," which should offer an improvement in raw CPU horsepower, and what AMD is calling heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access (hUMA), which should allow the CPU and GPU units to work together more closely.
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