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The biggest problem with the FX series, IMO, was the deceptive marketing. The FX-8000 CPUs were marketed as being 8-core, when in reality every pair of cores sh

The biggest problem with the FX series, IMO, was the deceptive marketing. The FX-8000 CPUs were marketed as being 8-core, when in reality every pair of cores shared an FPU and cache, so real-world performance was much closer to that of a quad-core for many workloads. Add on top of that the abysmal IPC (compared to Intel's offerings) and high power consumption, and there was very little reason to get an FX-8350 or similar over an i5. (Yes, today the FX CPUs are much cheaper, but when they came out they were barely so. I know because I got an FX-8350 as soon as it came out and regretted it.)

Cyph0n 10y ago
Yeah, I would understand going for an i5 if the price difference was insignificant.
mrb 10y ago
I have to disagree with that. Most workloads (H.264 decoding/encoding, gaming, typical desktop software, etc) are ALU-bound not FPU-bound. So the FX series is generally beating Intel on the perf/$ metric, just because it is so darn inexpensive. In my experience a $100 FX CPU is as good as a $200 Intel CPU when doing H.264 encoding: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13172972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13172972 (However the FX series perf/watt is worse than Intel, I give you that.)
- RussianCow 10y ago
  Video encoding/decoding is definitely a niche for which the FX series had great value when it came out, so I agree with you on that. However, for gaming and most "typical desktop software", having higher single-core performance is much more important than having more cores, and the FX series was a huge letdown there. Then you factor in the extra energy you're using, and all of a sudden there are very few cases in which it makes sense to buy an AMD CPU over an Intel one. (They're much cheaper now, so it might make a lot more sense to buy one today, but I'm sticking with my Intel CPU until AMD can prove themselves.)

Cyph0n 10y ago

Yeah, I would understand going for an i5 if the price difference was insignificant.

mrb 10y ago

I have to disagree with that. Most workloads (H.264 decoding/encoding, gaming, typical desktop software, etc) are ALU-bound not FPU-bound. So the FX series is generally beating Intel on the perf/$ metric, just because it is so darn inexpensive. In my experience a $100 FX CPU is as good as a $200 Intel CPU when doing H.264 encoding: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13172972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13172972 (However the FX series perf/watt is worse than Intel, I give you that.)

RussianCow 10y ago
Video encoding/decoding is definitely a niche for which the FX series had great value when it came out, so I agree with you on that. However, for gaming and most "typical desktop software", having higher single-core performance is much more important than having more cores, and the FX series was a huge letdown there. Then you factor in the extra energy you're using, and all of a sudden there are very few cases in which it makes sense to buy an AMD CPU over an Intel one. (They're much cheaper now, so it might make a lot more sense to buy one today, but I'm sticking with my Intel CPU until AMD can prove themselves.)