But, in the interest of fairness, even though I'm sure I'm the least of their worries, I'm going to show their rebuttal and respond to it. After all, I hate when people can't be objective.
Our Take on AMD FX
This week we launched the highly anticipated AMD FX series of desktop processors. Based on initial technical reviews, there are some in our community who feel the product performance did not meet their expectations of the AMD FX and the “Bulldozer” architecture. Over the past two days we’ve been listening to you and wanted to help you make sense of the new processors. As you begin to play with the AMD FX CPU processor, I foresee a few things will register:
In our design considerations, AMD focused on applications and environments that we believe our customers use – and which we expect them to use in the future. The architecture focuses on high-frequency and resource sharing to achieve optimal throughput and speed in next generation applications and high-resolution gaming.
Here’s some example scenarios where the AMD FX processor shines:
Playing the Latest Games
A perfect example is Battlefield 3. Take a look at how our test of AMD FX CPU compared to the Core i7 2600K and AMD Phenom™ II X6 1100T processors at full settings:
Benchmarking done with a single AMD Radeon™ HD 6970 graphics card
Map Resolution AMD FX-8150 Sandy Bridge i7 2600k AMD Phenom™ II X6 1100T MP_011 1650x1080x32 max settings 39.3 37.5 36.3 MP_011 1920x1200x32 max settings 33.2 31.8 30.6 MP_011 2560x1600x32 max settings 21.4 20.4 19.9
Creating in HD
Those users running time intensive tasks are going to want an AMD FX processor for applications like x264, HandBrake, Cinema4D where an eight-core processor will rip right along.
Building for the Future
This is a new architecture. Compilers have recently been updated, and programs have just started exploring the new instructions like XOP and FMA4 (two new instructions first supported by the AMD FX CPU) to speed up many applications, especially when compared to our older generation.
If you are running lightly threaded apps most of the time, then there are plenty of other solutions out there. But if you’re like me and use your desktop for high resolution gaming and want to tackle time intensive tasks with newer multi-threaded applications, the AMD FX processor won’t let you down.
We are a company committed to our customers and we’re constantly listening and working to improve our products. Please let us know what questions you have and we’ll do our best to respond.
Adam Kozak is a product marketing manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.
For starters, I'd buy the bit about design considerations based on what users need or will need in the future a bit more if FX was being marketed as a professional CPU, or a processor for college kids, and either way, priced a good bit lower. When you start trying to sell it as a consumer CPU, it needs to not be a step backwards in tasks that they're doing right now. Like gaming, perhaps. Yes, it did well in a few, generally the ones that are designed like software should be these days as far as threading. I don't think any enthusiast will argue against better threading in games. But it doesn't exist NOW, which is when FX went on the market. But frankly, since the majority of games are GPU bound anyway, better threading would only help in a portion of the market.
Generally, I look for inconsistencies when I read stuff like this. Notice, they show exact bench FPS from their tests in BF3. Talking about encoding, they just comment on how well threaded encoding tends to be. Why, exactly? Well, because the FX8150 kind of chills with higher end Intel. Which is soon to be surpassed by better Intel. That kind of sucks for AMD.
Now don't get me wrong, FX isn't technically bad. It's just horrendously overpriced. If the 8150 was at a price point with multi-locked i5's like 2300 or 2400, and the motherboards a bit cheaper, it would be an outstanding buy for several types of users. I could see college students doing video related or software related tasks, and being able to toss those to 6 cores, and do light gaming on another 2. Cheap streaming for E-Sports types would also be plausible.
So, sorry, AMD, but I'm not buying the statement. No, they aren't technically as terrible as they're getting made out to be, but between the hype and the pricing at the retail channels, this is a joke.
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