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I had a programmer friend who got the FX-8150 in 2012 for compiling - pricewise it was basically equivalent to a i5 but you got 8 integer cores in return. It's

I had a programmer friend who got the FX-8150 in 2012 for compiling - pricewise it was basically equivalent to a i5 but you got 8 integer cores in return. It's a decent choice if you prioritize core count over single-core/FP performance. Efficiency wise those desktop CPUs were space heaters, with the FX-9590 coming to mind. Pre-Zen laptops were also notorious for poor battery life.

paulmd 4y ago
> I had a programmer friend who got the FX-8150 in 2012 for compiling - pricewise it was basically equivalent to a i5 but you got 8 integer cores in return. but the integer cores shared a frontend which alternated between feeding the two cores, so using all 8 threads (2 threads per module) reduced per-thread performance even further from the already abysmal 1TPM performance levels. The FX-8150 failed to outperform a 2500K in compiling let alone a 2600K. In fact it was significantly slower than a Phenom II X6, which was much closer to the 2600K while the FX-8150 failed to even match the 2500K. https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4955/41699.png https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4955/41699.png (may need to hit enter or open-in-private-window to force a referrerless load) You can see how hard that shared frontend hits - Phenom with 6 "modules" curbstomps the Bulldozer in compiles despite having "fewer threads". It's not just that Bulldozer IPC is bad per-thread and it's made up with more threads, using more threads actually causes further reductions of the IPC which destroy a lot of the benefits of having those threads in the first place. It was not a good processor even in heavily multithreaded loads, outside some happy cases. Frankly there was just as much of a fanboy effect in those days as in the early days of Ryzen, which really wasn't justified by the actual performance. Most actual productivity loads used AVX which strongly favored Intel over Ryzen due to the half-rate AVX2, the 5820K did great in those workloads for a very affordable price and was also much better in gaming/etc, plus had massive overclocking headroom. But people tend to laser-focus on the handful of very specific workloads Ryzen 1000 did OK at. Intel was generally much more potent per-core if you did video encoding, for example, or in later Cinebench variants that used AVX. But Ryzen looked real good in pre-AVX cinebench R11.5 and R15 so that's what people cited. People bought Bulldozer because they had always bought AMD and that was the brand they identified with on a social level. It was a terrible product and only slightly mitigated by the Piledriver series (FX-8350)... which had to go up against Ivy Bridge and later Haswell, where it was just as far behind. https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph6396/51121.png https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph6396/51121.png Same story as Phenom. Bulldozer would have been a competitive product if it got to market 2 years earlier and didn't need another couple years to fix the deficiencies.
- johnklos 4y ago
  These were interesting results then, but I think code generation and OSes have evolved enough that current compiles on a current OS with a current toolchain are actually faster on an FX-8150 than on an i5 of the age from those results. Even from the time that Ryzen first came out until now, OSes have been improving threading, reducing contention, et cetera, to noticeable degrees. Tell you what - when I'm back on the coast that has my older machines, I'll run some modern compiles on a quad i5 of that era and on my FX-8150, and we'll see. If nothing else, perhaps it'll be interesting to see how much threading performance has improved in the last decade. BTW - I did do side-by-side testing back then between the quad i7 and the FX-8150, and the results were certainly not as clear cut as these. Then again, I wasn't building a huge, barely portable source tree with -J 8 like Chromium - I was building many separate things in parallel at the same time. The cost is what ultimately tipped me in favor of AMD. Not everyone who bought AMD then was necessarily a fanboi, and I'd point out that people who were fans of the Ryzens when they were new often liked both how they were very favorably priced compared with anything Intel, plus how we were assured that later Ryzens would work in our then current motherboards. Having just replaced a Ryzen 2600 with a Ryzen 5700X and seeing overall power usage go down, I'd have to disagree with your early Ryzen sentiment.

paulmd 4y ago

> I had a programmer friend who got the FX-8150 in 2012 for compiling - pricewise it was basically equivalent to a i5 but you got 8 integer cores in return. but the integer cores shared a frontend which alternated between feeding the two cores, so using all 8 threads (2 threads per module) reduced per-thread performance even further from the already abysmal 1TPM performance levels. The FX-8150 failed to outperform a 2500K in compiling let alone a 2600K. In fact it was significantly slower than a Phenom II X6, which was much closer to the 2600K while the FX-8150 failed to even match the 2500K. https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4955/41699.png https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4955/41699.png (may need to hit enter or open-in-private-window to force a referrerless load) You can see how hard that shared frontend hits - Phenom with 6 "modules" curbstomps the Bulldozer in compiles despite having "fewer threads". It's not just that Bulldozer IPC is bad per-thread and it's made up with more threads, using more threads actually causes further reductions of the IPC which destroy a lot of the benefits of having those threads in the first place. It was not a good processor even in heavily multithreaded loads, outside some happy cases. Frankly there was just as much of a fanboy effect in those days as in the early days of Ryzen, which really wasn't justified by the actual performance. Most actual productivity loads used AVX which strongly favored Intel over Ryzen due to the half-rate AVX2, the 5820K did great in those workloads for a very affordable price and was also much better in gaming/etc, plus had massive overclocking headroom. But people tend to laser-focus on the handful of very specific workloads Ryzen 1000 did OK at. Intel was generally much more potent per-core if you did video encoding, for example, or in later Cinebench variants that used AVX. But Ryzen looked real good in pre-AVX cinebench R11.5 and R15 so that's what people cited. People bought Bulldozer because they had always bought AMD and that was the brand they identified with on a social level. It was a terrible product and only slightly mitigated by the Piledriver series (FX-8350)... which had to go up against Ivy Bridge and later Haswell, where it was just as far behind. https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph6396/51121.png https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph6396/51121.png Same story as Phenom. Bulldozer would have been a competitive product if it got to market 2 years earlier and didn't need another couple years to fix the deficiencies.

johnklos 4y ago
These were interesting results then, but I think code generation and OSes have evolved enough that current compiles on a current OS with a current toolchain are actually faster on an FX-8150 than on an i5 of the age from those results. Even from the time that Ryzen first came out until now, OSes have been improving threading, reducing contention, et cetera, to noticeable degrees. Tell you what - when I'm back on the coast that has my older machines, I'll run some modern compiles on a quad i5 of that era and on my FX-8150, and we'll see. If nothing else, perhaps it'll be interesting to see how much threading performance has improved in the last decade. BTW - I did do side-by-side testing back then between the quad i7 and the FX-8150, and the results were certainly not as clear cut as these. Then again, I wasn't building a huge, barely portable source tree with -J 8 like Chromium - I was building many separate things in parallel at the same time. The cost is what ultimately tipped me in favor of AMD. Not everyone who bought AMD then was necessarily a fanboi, and I'd point out that people who were fans of the Ryzens when they were new often liked both how they were very favorably priced compared with anything Intel, plus how we were assured that later Ryzens would work in our then current motherboards. Having just replaced a Ryzen 2600 with a Ryzen 5700X and seeing overall power usage go down, I'd have to disagree with your early Ryzen sentiment.