9 Years of AMD CPUs: From AMD FX to Ryzen 5000 Series, Tested

[Steve]

Today's CPU review is all about AMD's performance progress, comparing a flagship part from the AMD FX era and all Ryzen series with just 4 cores enabled at a fixed frequency to make direct comparisons, and then some.

Permalink to review.

https://www.techspot.com/review/2333-amd-cpu-performance-progress/

 

[paul1122]

Interestingly, the new Intel flagship smokes them all, as tested by Techspot. True story.

 

[Geralt]

Bulldozer was a real fiasco.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

The construction core was an utter disaster.I often wondered back then what would have happened if they had simply stuck with optimized K10 instead. The llano APU obliterated the later 4000 and 5000 series APUs, and many simply wanted AMD to take their phenom 1100t and put it on the 32nm node bulldozer ran on.

Interestingly, the new Intel flagship smokes them all, as tested by Techspot. True story.

Techspot has not tested Alder Lake. Nobody officially has.

 

[winjer]

If I remember correctly, Bulldozer was so bad, it had a slightly worse IPC than Phenom II.
Fortunately AMD was able to turn around and build a new arch that can compete with Intel.
Seeing how Intel did so little to innovate in the last 5 years, if AMD was not here, it would have been even worse.
We probably would still be stuck with 4 core CPUs for the high end. No IPC gains, and minor clock increases.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

If I remember correctly, Bulldozer was so bad, it had a slightly worse IPC than Phenom II.

It was. The FX-8150 often lost to the phenom II 1100t/1090t/980, even when OCed.

Fortunately AMD was able to turn around and build a new arch that can compete with Intel.
Seeing how Intel did so little to innovate in the last 5 years, if AMD was not here, it would have been even worse.
We probably would still be stuck with 4 core CPUs for the high end. No IPC gains, and minor clock increases.

I disagree. During the bulldozer years games were single threaded. Everyone screaming about "MOAR CORES" and intel stagnation have forgotten how much fun we made of AMD's "MOAR CORES" design when their 8 core was being beaten by an i3.

There were 6+ cores available, in intel's HDET design. And every time they were tested, they were slower then the quad core parts, despite having 6 cores and triple/quad channel memory. The demand simply wasnt there. It took until 2018 for games to FINALLY start using 4 cores, which is when 6 cores showed an advantage (4 cores for game+2 for system). the jump from 6 to 8 cores has showed much smaller gains, and quad core i3s can still hold over 60 FPS 1% minimums in every game on the market today. Techspot tested this just recently:

https://www.techspot.com/review/2331-intel-5th-gen-vs-10th-gen/

 

[elementalSG]

AMD 4 core performance from FX-8350 to Ryzen 7 5800X more than doubling from 211FPS to 497FPS? Now that’s more like it! Good job AMD for not giving up when Intel was beating you to a bloody pulp so we have competition again in the CPU arena!

 

[winjer]

It was. The FX-8150 often lost to the phenom II 1100t/1090t/980, even when OCed.


I disagree. During the bulldozer years games were single threaded. Everyone screaming about "MOAR CORES" and intel stagnation have forgotten how much fun we made of AMD's "MOAR CORES" design when their 8 core was being beaten by an i3.

There were 6+ cores available, in intel's HDET design. And every time they were tested, they were slower then the quad core parts, despite having 6 cores and triple/quad channel memory. The demand simply wasnt there. It took until 2018 for games to FINALLY start using 4 cores, which is when 6 cores showed an advantage (4 cores for game+2 for system). the jump from 6 to 8 cores has showed much smaller gains, and quad core i3s can still hold over 60 FPS 1% minimums in every game on the market today. Techspot tested this just recently:

https://www.techspot.com/review/2331-intel-5th-gen-vs-10th-gen/

Did you notice how many Intel gens, the i7s had only 4 cores.
But after Zen, in just a couple of years, the i7s got 8 cores.

 

[Gimp65]

Interestingly, the new Intel flagship smokes them all, as tested by Techspot. True story.

ADL looks really good from the leaks, I have no doubt it will take the performance crown in general on the desktop and laptop, though it wont be a total win, more like a tie or win for Zen 3D in workloads with large data sets due the cache advantage AMD will have with Zen 3D.

Regarding Intel and AMD's most important CPU's, the Xeons and the EPYC's, AMD has been in the clear lead since Rome came out and from looking at the roadmaps of each camp it looks like AMD will continue to dominate Intel in this key market. Good times

 

[Targonis]

Interestingly, the new Intel flagship smokes them all, as tested by Techspot. True story.

You mean the unreleased Alder Lake with DDR5 memory, or that nonsense benchmark used that even when AMD has a performance lead, Userbenchmark gives the advantage to Intel?

 

[Targonis]

ADL looks really good from the leaks, I have no doubt it will take the performance crown in general on the desktop and laptop, though it wont be a total win, more like a tie or win for Zen 3D in workloads with large data sets due the cache advantage AMD will have with Zen 3D.

Regarding Intel and AMD's most important CPU's, the Xeons and the EPYC's, AMD has been in the clear lead since Rome came out and from looking at the roadmaps of each camp it looks like AMD will continue to dominate Intel in this key market. Good times

Much of the performance improvement in Alder Lake may be due to the use of DDR5 memory. Since Alder Lake will work with both DDR4 and DDR5, it will be interesting to see how well or poorly the same chip runs with DDR4 and having only a 2 channel memory controller.

 

[DZillaXx]

If I remember correctly, Bulldozer was so bad, it had a slightly worse IPC than Phenom II.
Fortunately AMD was able to turn around and build a new arch that can compete with Intel.
Seeing how Intel did so little to innovate in the last 5 years, if AMD was not here, it would have been even worse.
We probably would still be stuck with 4 core CPUs for the high end. No IPC gains, and minor clock increases.

Bulldozer was real bad, Piledriver was an improvement but re never really got a real upgrade for piledriver, excavator was only really used on APU. It was a big step up from Piledriver but AMD already knew that arch was hopeless and Ryzen was already underway. AMD decided to bite their time and let their desktop chips sit in limbo for a couple years while Ryzen was ready. We saw a lot of AMD APU work done in this time frame.

Phenom II was by far the better design and should have continued on. An 8 Core Phenom II design with 4ghz+ clock speeds would have served AMD a good deal better, and they had the means to do so. Sadly Their Ego to keep Bulldozer on sale hurt them bad, should never have made it to market.

Phenom II was a pretty competitive chip in its day.

 

[Avro Arrow]

"Some might still argue that the FX-8350 is an 8 core CPU, but it’s not, and it’s certainly not according to the California Consumers Legal Remedies Act."

I don't care what some court says about tech, especially in some absurd civil case in a country where you can legally sue ANYBODY for ANYTHING. The CPU core was defined as an integer computing core since the original Intel 4004. According to the "California Consumers Legal Remedies Act", Intel, AMD, Motorola, Texas Instruments (Cyrix), SPARC, IBM and VIA could ALL be sued for selling CPUs that didn't have FPUs attached. The FPU isn't even x86 architecture, it's x87 architecture and used to be (pre-486DX) sold separately as a "math co-processor" for floating-point operations.

Steve, I'm surprised at you that you'd let some court in another country make you ignore all the knowledge that you have about CPUs. Since when are lawsuits in the USA determined by who is right as opposed to "who just doesn't want to deal with it anymore"?

No court in some US state is going to define what a CPU core is for me when I've known damn well what a CPU core is for more than 20 years before that frivolous lawsuit case was brought forward. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that Intel had something to do with it.

 

[Achaios]

Bulldozer was a real fiasco.

*Faildozer.

Fixed that for you.

 

[Achaios]

. It took until 2018 for games to FINALLY start using 4 cores, which is when 6 cores showed an advantage (4 cores for game+2 for system).

https://www.techspot.com/review/2331-intel-5th-gen-vs-10th-gen/

Wrong.

GTA V was capable of using, and receive a benefit from, 6 core CPU's back in 2013. Your facts are all wrong as usual, and as usual again you are fanboying Intel hard.

 

[Avro Arrow]

Interestingly, the new Intel flagship smokes them all, as tested by Techspot. True story.

Sure, using a benchmark that Intel themselves paid for. True Story.

 

[Avro Arrow]

The construction core was an utter disaster.I often wondered back then what would have happened if they had simply stuck with optimized K10 instead. The llano APU obliterated the later 4000 and 5000 series APUs, and many simply wanted AMD to take their phenom 1100t and put it on the 32nm node bulldozer ran on.

It's true. AMD should have just done that. However, I wouldn't call the PileDriver an utter disaster because for many people's purposes it was sufficient and the CPU itself was DIRT cheap. I used my FX-8350 for like five years and was able to play every game that I wanted to on it without issue. It's possible that if I had a faster CPU it might have been better but I was quite satisfied with what I had and I paid only $170CAD for the thing so for me, it turned out to be an absolute bargain.

Techspot has not tested Alder Lake. Nobody officially has.

Agreed, 100%.

 

[winjer]

Bulldozer was real bad, Piledriver was an improvement but re never really got a real upgrade for piledriver, excavator was only really used on APU. It was a big step up from Piledriver but AMD already knew that arch was hopeless and Ryzen was already underway. AMD decided to bite their time and let their desktop chips sit in limbo for a couple years while Ryzen was ready. We saw a lot of AMD APU work done in this time frame.

Phenom II was by far the better design and should have continued on. An 8 Core Phenom II design with 4ghz+ clock speeds would have served AMD a good deal better, and they had the means to do so. Sadly Their Ego to keep Bulldozer on sale hurt them bad, should never have made it to market.

Phenom II was a pretty competitive chip in its day.

Very true.
Phenom II with a bit of IPC improvements and higher clock speed, would have been much better than Bulldozer.
But then again, we have the power of hindsight.
I bet no one at AMD expected Bulldozer to come out as bad as it did.
Not that GF would have so many problems with it's production.

 

[hahahanoobs]

AMD came from the literal bottom, scrapping everything they had in development followed by 5 years off, so of course their improvements look better compared to a company that struggled with 10nm they were responsible for designing and manufacturing, but DIDN'T quit. Yet AMD gets all the praise?

LMAO.

 

[theruck]

The FX was unbelievably shitty cpu
why didnt you add sisoft sandra results same as you did for the old Intel cpu comparison article?

 

[Avro Arrow]

Very true.
Phenom II with a bit of IPC improvements and higher clock speed, would have been much better than Bulldozer.
But then again, we have the power of hindsight.
I bet no one at AMD expected Bulldozer to come out as bad as it did.
Not that GF would have so many problems with it's production.

The thing is, even when AMD discovered that Bulldozer's IPC was worse than Debeb/Thuban/Llano, they didn't do anything about it. I blame AMD for that because they had plenty of time to change their minds. As it is, I wouldn't touch a craptop with an FX CPU because they were pretty expensive for what you got, unlike the $170CAD I paid for my FX-8350 brand-new. The fact that they drank juice as fast as an alcoholic puts away rum coolers certainly didn't help them in the mobile space. AMD would have been better off sticking to Llano derivatives for mobile applications.

My Llano craptop however, was an absolute bargain at $500CAD. It lasted for ten years (I don't do anything super difficult with my craptops) and still technically works today. I replaced it with a Ryzen 5 3500U craptop and the difference is night and day with regard to speed. The other difference of course is that this craptop's max ram is 32GB (I have 16) and my Llano maxed out at 8GB (which it has).

 

[winjer]

The thing is, even when AMD discovered that Bulldozer's IPC was worse than Debeb/Thuban/Llano, they didn't do anything about it. I blame AMD for that because they had plenty of time to change their minds. As it is, I wouldn't touch a craptop with an FX CPU because they were pretty expensive for what you got, unlike the $170CAD I paid for my FX-8350 brand-new. The fact that they drank juice as fast as an alcoholic puts away rum coolers certainly didn't help them in the mobile space. AMD would have been better off sticking to Llano derivatives for mobile applications.

My Llano craptop however, was an absolute bargain at $500CAD. It lasted for ten years (I don't do anything super difficult with my craptops) and still technically works today. I replaced it with a Ryzen 5 3500U craptop and the difference is night and day with regard to speed. The other difference of course is that this craptop's max ram is 32GB (I have 16) and my Llano maxed out at 8GB (which it has).

That's the curious part. AMD's APUs from that era were also based on Bulldozer. But they had some cutbacks, like less cache, only 2-wide pipeline, etc.
But AMD stopped trying to increase IPC after Vishera.
But on the APU side, there were more generations with IPC improvements.
I guess that AMD thought APUs were worth investing more than full desktop CPUs.

 

[Avro Arrow]

ADL looks really good from the leaks,

Of course it does. It turns out that Intel paid Stardock for the updated version that used 16 cores but ONLY 24 threads! (Someone posted the evidence of this in the comment section of the actual article about the AOTS test specifically). Stardock would never have done that on their own because before Alder Lake, there had never before been a 16-core 24-thread CPU. All 16-core CPUs had 32 threads. That leak is what is known in the industry as irrelevant.

It's about as trustworthy as SysMark, Intel's Compiler, LoserUserBenchmark and liquid cooling using a secret water chiller.

 

[DZillaXx]

Very true.
Phenom II with a bit of IPC improvements and higher clock speed, would have been much better than Bulldozer.
But then again, we have the power of hindsight.
I bet no one at AMD expected Bulldozer to come out as bad as it did.
Not that GF would have so many problems with it's production.

Honestly if they kept going with Phenom and we saw Phenom III and IV, we probably would never have gotten Ryzen.

So Kudos to the Bulldozer Lineup for the most exciting thing to happen to X86 in the last decade.

 

[winjer]

Honestly if they kept going with Phenom and we saw Phenom III and IV, we probably would never have gotten Ryzen.

So Kudos to the Bulldozer Lineup for the most exciting thing to happen to X86 in the last decade.

AMD would have to release a new arch eventually.
Maybe instead of having Zen in 2017, we would have it in 2018 or 2019.