I mean significantly better, like meaningfully, by a fair margin. They all seem to trade blows with each other at the moment, depending on what the benchmark matrix is. I was looking at the FX8320Es and their PCMARK scores, and their prices, and VT-D and ECC support, and what the Xeons are going for, and wondering why no FX8320e love.
You can pick one up and a motherboard for less than the price of most quad core xeons, and they aren't terrible offenders in terms of power usage, not to mention you can OC/UnderVolt to squeeze out more IPC, per watt. Couldn't find any examples though of people using them.... Your definitely making sacrifices though, limited to atx, no IPMI or dual Gbit lan onboard, but still...
Well as someone who has a budget low price Kevari laptop (A4-5000) I have to argue with you on this. Its fast for its price bracket and extremely energy efficient (6+ hour battery life) for less than 300 dollars.
More of that is what consumers and manufacturers want and why should AMD let Intel be the only option when it comes to that? The only weakness of the lower end mobile Kevari line is that its GPU tends to be underpowered and the memory is often single channel, if Excavator fixes some of that then whats the problem with producing them.
I don't want AMD to go away. i don't want you to think i feel that way.
I want AMD to stop focusing on the "Excavator" Processors. cause it's not competitive. The low-end mobile APU's are amazing, don't get me wrong. but once you go into the High End, it's a mess. the power-draw of the high end mobile APUs and GPUs is too damn high.
There is a reason there isn't many AMD based laptops as there were years ago. AMD hasn't focuses on efficiency on the high-end in a long time. and it almost defeats the purpose of a Laptop. on top of that, The Mobile APUs core performance isn't splendid for gaming, they get the job done, but for someone who is going to buy a gaming laptop, they aren't going to really buy an AMD based laptop, knowing the Intel beats it. unless they have a brand-loyalty. which is fine. there isn't anything wrong with that. but in the long run, and the point I'm trying to get across, is that AMD needs to focus on performance now, and not the low-end. we clearly know AMD has that down.
Zen should fix that, would like too see their 14nm APUS with full HSA support, HBM and their latest GCN architecture. We have potential for some really high performance low power stuff here. AMD clearly has a plan with this stuff and I would say that HSA and HBM is supposed to fit together in this plan.
Just imagine if the lower end zen APUS were full SOCs, with the HBM. That would be insane.
Yesterday, at the AMD Financial Analyst Day event, the company finally decided that enough was enough: AMD will no longer be competing in a race to the bottom. "It's extraordinarily important to ensure that we have competitive, high-performance cores," said CEO Lisa Su. "We have reduced our low-end PC exposure. When you look at AMD's historical business, we were very, very heavily concentrated in consumer, low end PCs, that was actually our speciality. However, when you look at that market, there has been so much volatility, especially at the intersection between tablets and PCs and differentiation hasn't been there... very clearly, we are an x86 company. We have tremendous x86 heritage, and opportunity to lead in that area. We are absolutely going to invest in high-performance x86."
That's the best news ever. We need the giants going toe to toe in beast mode to get the creative juices flowing.
Intel have been cooling there jets for far to long. I saw a Linus video on the xeon CPU with 18 cores HT'ed for 36 virtual cores. $4500 CPU. They can make this now and its on the same old silicon our CPU's use. All that is needed is competition and this new tech goes mainstream faster.
I have to wonder what the pricing will be. 8c/16t priced with the i7, 8c with the i5 6c/12t somewhere 6c with the i3, 4c/8t with the pentiumm 4c with the celeron? Or maybe they'll all have smt, I dunno.
The very same happened to Intel at the end of the Pentium4, the high end stuff was not competitive with what AMD had at the time and it took a lot of effort and butthurt before Intel was ready (key word ready) to drop the Netburst design and revive the P6 line then use it to design a product that could would scale up rather than scale down. AMD aiming lower performance and high value is exactly what Intel did and that worked out great for them. The only difference is AMD hasn't got the cash necessary to make entirely separate products to cover high performance premium products and moderate performance high value markets.
You can't snap your fingers and magic a processor into existence, design is measured in years, production take can months to get yields up to acceptable levels and final validation (with microcode bug fixes) can take just as long. Even if AMD wanted to skip Excavator, which would be stupid because it is targeting a market (cheap devices that can "play" games, HD video etc) that is profitable and growing just to release Zen tomorrow they just can't do that.
AMD needs to start besting Intel at ipc or at least being somewhat more competitive. There is a reason I'm replacing my dying 8350 with a Xeon and not another 8350/8370.
Im saying AMD is going to do what is best for its continued business, which is bring out the Excavator because they can't just whip out Zen, they can't afford it and probably can't afford Zen to be another Bulldozer (good in concept, poor in execution).