Bulldozer can't, no, and the archaic software environment doesn't help it either. That shouldn't speak ill of AMD as a whole. I think it's obvious that the 9xxx CPUs were just a stop-gap to make them look busy to people who don't understand the CPU industry.
Did they say that? I didn't hear that from AMD. Just curious here.
Hopefully their upcoming Zen CPUs will be much stronger.
Even if the platform as a whole is $1000+ more than an amd setup, it is still twice as fast. if you make a ton of videos (think several short videos a day) you are losing income if you can't produce as many videos because of render times. The cpu would pay for itself in no time.
On the physics side of things it's not always as simple as running your code on a gpu (often times the software is not there). It is true however that multiple xeons are preferable to an i7, I was just using an example of high powered computing that I have a little more experience with.
at the end of the day though, if your workflow is limited by computing time, $1000 is peanuts.
Would, lets say, two FX-8350 systems be better than a i7-5960X system? If there are just a bunch of short videos being rendered, the workload could be somewhat easily divided between the two systems.
As someone who does Digital Forensic classes in college I find myself running over 30+ applications, Imaging Hashing,Multiple VMS. I wanted something cheap that could do it. So far it can do it. The only thing I can complain about is my RAM, 16GBs right now is simply not enough for me. Xoam can vouch for me. I am a application/tab HOG. Just yesterday I had imaged a entire 250GB physical disk. For me it was something cheap with a lot of power.
Now you are talking about a more complicated setup that does not save you that much money (if any, now you have to buy an entire additional computer) on initial investment. But people can and do have clusters with just a handful of nodes. I don't personally have experience with these setups, but as a engineer I'm inclined to say I don't like the unnecessary complexity when you could get a single cpu solution. If you need multiple cpus, dual/quad socket Xeon/Opteron solutions seem preferable. Unfortunately now you are talking about solutions that are out of reach for a lot of small and upstart content creators. An extra $1000 is a manageable investment, $10000 is much more difficult.
My friends i7 gets 1 to 3 FPS better in games than my FX-8350, the difference being mine cost $200 when his cost $350. It's all about price to performance, and that's why I chose the 8350 (of course this was a year ago, before haswell)
Well lets do some maths then, it's $384 more for the ram as a starters (that is non ECC stuff so if you need that you are already completely screwed there), the CPU is what $200 more roughly, board is probably going to be say $100 more, that is what $700 premium.
That is $606, and the intel system is $706, so I suppose at least you are getting roughly what you pay for, I guess since it does appear about twice as fast in some benchmarks. But then again on the other hand the 4930k and 3930k perform very similar, the 4930K is only $200 more (still a $180 saving just from the ram alone, and another $384 if you get 32GB more) and it has 25% more PCIE-lanes!
You know suddenly it doesn't look very appealing anymore considering what its replacing, which is something that was already a very expensive platform that delivered slightly better performance with a better feature set for a significant price premium. Hey it would have been completely different if it didnt have that god forsaken NIGHTMARE ram that was an absoloutely crazy engineering nightmare to create....
And in all seriousness I am beginning to think that if you really need the horsepower that you have better bang for your buck with something like dual xeons...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Tyudcr1uLY
Ironically it was based off of their server chip, yet there is no dual socket version >.<. They should have come out with those 'E' parts and dual socket chipset day one. Would have been pretty cool for home servers.
I cannot follow your math... I'm only looking at it for a couple seconds before work but it looks funny. Only $200 more for the cpu? 4930k and 5960x do not perform similarly. There is as much as a 25%-30% difference. If this is your business that is a big difference.
I would have really liked that, maybe with ECC memory so it can support more than 32GBs, I mean come on.. Some people like me want to spend 800 dollars on memory! Some people need more than 32GBs.
That's what I love about the 8350 and 6300 chips. They are pretty freaking fast even though they're old, and are MORE than good enough for gaming, but are also good for other things like a Proxmox server. Again, I know it's not the bleeding edge, but most of us don't need the bleeding edge, we just need something that gets the job done, and the 8350 is it. (Or the 6300) and again, try finding an Intel CPU with similar performance for $180. Not just in games, because with current games only using 2 cores most of the time, it doesn't matter. But in other applications. People don't realize it but the 8350 really does make a fantastic server chip, especially for virtualization. It's fast, but also has a crap ton of cores. They also (as many here have said) perform INCREDIBLY faster under Linux than under Windows. I've only managed to totally max out my FX 6300 on Debian with running "yes" on the command line or rendering something in Blender.
Overall, yes, Intel does offer the last 2-3% of performance. But at a very high price. If you just need a good CPU that gets the job done, AMD wins.
I don't know that I could justify more than 64GB RAM total, but I can say if AMD made a dual socket FX8350 setup, I would just mail my wallet to AMD.
I have enjoyed my 8350. Multitasking on it had been a joy. Look forward to using linux on it later. Its more than i need tho. 6300 is enough for my use, mostly. :)~ I cant really compare these to intel versions of anything. I havent used intel for pc for decade or better. I have really enjoyed building amd platforms where my biggest problems have been driver updates,a rare bios update, and the sixcore core parking. Its been good as i sit in a room with my first to my latest pc(all in working order). I would hate move away another platform due to the lack of improvement or options.
I have disabled the core parking in my PC. Have you? https://bitsum.com/parkcontrol/ So far for me it worked on 8.1 and win 7
6 core and win 7, i did. for 8 core and win8.1 I have not had any issues. Good ' old process lasso. Old friend of mine from my single and dual core days.
Perhaps you should look at it again I am referring to a 5820K. Why the hell you are comparing a 5960X to a Fx8350 is beyond me. The CPU alone on that would cost more than the entire Fx8350 system, and the ram is like 2.5x the price, and the boards for it are like twice the price... There is nothing comparable about them.
And I am beginning to think if you really want the performance you are better off going with something like C612, Dual Xeon E5-2630 v3 (6 core each @ 2.4GHz base). Asus makes boards for them that would do quiet nicely for a workstation, ofcourse you could always put them in a rack and...
I am pretty sure it already has ECC memory support. And yes it would have been very nice, it still would be I guess...
I think you need to re-read this comment chain. I responded to the point made by decripple saying
2) Anything outside of gaming that is heavily threaded then dollar for dollar AMD stuff is still pretty darn good.
I then proceeded to explain why the extra productivity you get from a 5960x would more than make up for the upfront premium if it enables you to more easily make more content. The point being that even though the upfront cost is twice as much, the cpu would pay for itself many times over during the course of its life.
In the next post I addressed the use of multi socket configurations and even said that if you can afford it, it is preferable, but those setups come with the caveat of being out of reach from many small time or upstart content creators. That dual xeon platform is not a bad build and stock for stock would beat a 5960x. That being said it does cost a bit more as a whole (the difference in ram price is only a fraction of what you say). You can get 32 gb kits of DDR4 for $500 where you will probably spend close to $350 for a 32 GB kit for DDR3 (not quite 2.5x the price). You also need an extra cpu cooler for the xeon build. Basically you get what you pay for with the difference in price, and if you were to overclock the 5960x the performance would be very similar between both platforms. Either way we are still talking about which INTEL build you would rather have, not intel vs AMD.
This is the first time you even mention the 5820k. I established that I was referring to a 5960x with my first response to decripple.