About this time concluding year, AMD'due south new Bulldozer-based FX serial launched to bright-eyed system builders who expected the new architecture to challenge Intel's increasingly comfortable position in the upper-stop processor market. Unfortunately, Bulldozer wasn't all it was cracked upwardly to be. Its performance fell short of the then 9-month-onetime Sandy Bridge processors and in some cases, fifty-fifty failed to surpass the Phenom II range.

Post-obit Bulldozer's mediocre reception, AMD insisted that the new architecture was notwithstanding young and would serve as a "solid building block" for the FX series. Although hotfixes such equally one that addressed an SMT inefficiency have additional Bulldozer's operation slightly, little has inverse with AMD's FX series in the last year -- until now, anyhow, with today marking the arrival of the company's 2nd-generation FX offerings.

AMD is refreshing its desktop processors with Piledriver, an enhanced version of Bulldozer that focuses on improving instructions per clock and frequency -- something nosotros witnessed earlier this month when we tested the company's new Piledriver-powered Trinity APUs. In other words, instead of a major overhaul, Piledriver picks upward where Bulldozer left off, which may disappoint those who wanted AMD to abandon the architecture.

Peradventure the virtually controversial topic of last year's FX series was its new integer cadre/module design. Bulldozer's floating-point unit featured a consummate redesign with improvements to support many new instructions while also allowing resource sharing between cores. There were two 128-bit FMACs shared per module, assuasive for two 128-bit instructions per core or i 256-fleck pedagogy per dual-cadre module.

Although each module appears as two cores in the operating arrangement, they don't accept as many resource every bit traditional AMD cores. So, while AMD claimed that its FX-8150 was the first true eight-core desktop processor, it wasn't in reality and its performance reflected that. Over again, Piledriver doesn't alter this architecture in whatsoever significant way, pregnant the module pattern nonetheless exists in today'southward Vishera FX series processors.

As we saw recently when testing the A10-5800K Trinity APU, Piledriver offered a good for you improvement in power consumption, which immune AMD to increase the fleck'due south clock frequency past 31% over the older A8-3850. For a sample of what this ways for the new FX series processors, AMD has said that the chips will offering as much every bit xx% to 30% more functioning in digital media workloads -- a significant heave, if authentic.

The parts released today include the FX-8350, FX-8320, FX-6300 and FX-4320, which are detailed above. Although AMD is releasing iv new FX chips, we're only testing the FX-8350 and FX-6300. Compared to their predecessors, the FX-8350 comes clocked a footling over 10% college than the FX-8150, though its max turbo core frequency is the aforementioned at 4.2GHz, while the half dozen-cadre FX-6300 is clocked 6% higher than the FX-6100.

Interestingly, as an aside, the FX-4300 is clocked at the same iii.8GHz speed equally the older FX-4150, but while the older model featured a full 8MB L3 cache, the FX-4300's cache has been cut in half to 4MB. Also of note, all of the new Vishera FX models are supported by the existing Socket AM3+ and 9xx series chipsets, they have Turbo Core 3.0 technology and they apply the same dual-channel DDR3 memory interface.