AMD is stepping up their game with the new Vishera series of chips. AMD notes that the new 32nm Piledriver processor architecture boosts performance by 15% over the previous generation of FX chips – and at a lower price. For instance, the unlocked FX-8350 offers 8 cores clocked up to 5GHz for $195.
According to Ziff Davis:
“The FX-8350’s eight cores start at 4GHz and can jump to 4.2GHz in Turbo mode, while the $169 FX-8320’s eight cores start at 3.5GHz and max out at 4GHz (without overclocking). The $132 FX-6300 has six cores running at 3.5GHz (4.1GHz in Turbo mode), whereas the $122 quad-core FX-4300 starts at 3.8GHz and can hit 4GHz in Turbo.”
Each has an L2 cache of 1MB per core, the top three have an L3 cache of 8MB with the bargain-basement FX‐4300’s L3 at halving that at 4MB, and each communes with DDR3 memory at 1866MHz.
Ziff Davis also noted that “overclocking the FX-8350 to 4.7GHz provided performance equivalent to Core i7-3770K” but energy efficiency still trails behind Intel’s Ivy Bridge series. The chips are receiving mildly positive reviews.
AMD previously grabbed the overclocking Guinness World Record in November 2011 by cranking up a pre-release eight-core “Zambezi” FX desktop processor to a searing 8.429GHz, beating the previous record of 8.308GHz.