I suspect the improvements are even more dramatic going from Zen 1 through to Zen 5. AMD has really hit the jackpot with how scalable the Ryzen CPU is considering how they're able to improve the performance from year to year. This is a stark difference to the FX series during the 2010s, which saw very small YoY performance increases by comparison. Ryzen really is AMD's equivalent to what Nehalem/Core was for Intel back in the mid 2000s.
That is all true but I will defend the FX series a little. Mostly now that there is a lot of software that scales across cores better now, they haven't aged as terribly as others have. They aren't great but not terrible considering.
>Mostly now that there is a lot of software that scales across cores better now
That's pretty much irrelevant since the AMD's FX arch's issues weren't that SW at the time wasn't using all the 8 cores. Intel dropped the Core 2 Duo and Quad into the era where most SW was still stuck in single threaded for a long time and those CPUs still ripped single-threaded SW tasks regardless.
Here's the big reasons why the FX sucked back then and why they still suck today in the multi-thread SW era:
Instead of discrete, fully independent cores, AMD grouped processing units into "Modules" where each module contained two integer execution units, but they had to share critical resources like one FPU, the instruction fetch/decode pipeline, and the L2 cache so when both "cores" inside a module were heavily taxed especially with math or physics-heavy calculations (like in videogames), they choked fighting over shared hardware.
AMD designed Bulldozer with a very long pipeline, betting they could sacrifice efficiency per clock cycle in exchange for extraordinarily high clock speeds(a-la Intel Pentium 4) but the IPC was so bad that an FX core was often slower clock-for-clock than AMD’s previous-generation Phenom II chips and also their power consumption exploded.
FX processors were plagued by high cache latencies and an inefficient memory subsystem as another bottleneck.
So unless you're into collecting vintage CPUs as display pieces, this one definitely belongs in the e-waste pile instead of burning electricity, because it did not age like wine with the adoption of SW multi threading like people were hoping.
> AMD designed Bulldozer with a very long pipeline, betting they could sacrifice efficiency per clock cycle in exchange for extraordinarily high clock speeds
It blows my mind that AMD watched Intel try to do basically the same thing only a few years prior with NetBurst, and fail so badly that they had to scrap that entire evolutionary branch and start over – and AMD still went and did it again themselves anyway.
I remember rumblings a decade-ish ago that basically their hand was possibly forced to release the thing to avoid a full on revolt about abandoning all of their work; after all, Intel had been investing in deep pipelines for a while before, they were strapped for cash after the ATI Acquisition, and other 'server-ish' CPUs had done CMT type things in the past (keeping in mind that AMD was seeing a huge surge in server market share due to Hammer.)
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That's pretty much irrelevant since the AMD's FX arch's issues weren't that SW at the time wasn't using all the 8 cores. Intel dropped the Core 2 Duo and Quad into the era where most SW was still stuck in single threaded for a long time and those CPUs still ripped single-threaded SW tasks regardless.
Here's the big reasons why the FX sucked back then and why they still suck today in the multi-thread SW era:
So unless you're into collecting vintage CPUs as display pieces, this one definitely belongs in the e-waste pile instead of burning electricity, because it did not age like wine with the adoption of SW multi threading like people were hoping.MrDOS · · focus · HN ↗
It blows my mind that AMD watched Intel try to do basically the same thing only a few years prior with NetBurst, and fail so badly that they had to scrap that entire evolutionary branch and start over – and AMD still went and did it again themselves anyway.
to11mtm · · focus · HN ↗