Well its still impressive the performance that AMD FX8350 can offer for the money.
I realy like my FX8350, for the taks im using it, gaming and virtualization and normal tasks, there is not much of a diffrence between an i7 and FX8xxx cpu. and that for half the cost on the cpu.
i allways had intel before but i definitly not regrett jumping the amd route. i could also grab an I7-4930K for $500+ and render a movie in 10 minutes, but i could also grab an FX and render in 12 minutes.. what the hell i care, about those 2 minutes. ☺
It was more for bragging rights. They could say that they offered the first consumer desktop CPU that was clocked out of the box at 5.0Ghz. More to drum up attention less for the FX line and more for AMD as a whole.
The issue with shrinking the die is that you basically have to start over. While AMD doesn't produce their own CPUs anymore, I'm sure they would still have to foot some of the cost of shrinking the die. CPU manufacturing incredibly complex and expensive and shrinking the die basically means throwing out all of the really expensive equipment they have and buying new machines. A single stepper can cost 10s of millions and I really don't think AMD has the cash on hand at the moment to do anything like that.
Actually the shortcomings of the fabrication process used is a significant reason why there was no steamroller FX. There was an article a while back (I forget where) where an AMD executive was telling the press that because the 28nm process wasn't yielding high clock rate cpus, the small increase in IPC didn't significantly offset the decrease in clock rate from piledriver. So a steamroller FX wouldn't have been much faster if at all than piledriver, so it wasn't worth the cost of manufacturing them.
Turbo core 3.0 is a new implementation in the FX 9xxx cpus, I'm not exactly sure what it does, it doesn't sound like that large of an improvement though.
While the FX-9590’s baseline architecture remains the same, AMD has integrated their Turbo Core 3.0 technology which allows clock speeds to reach higher levels more often. However, the spectacular speeds on this 32nm CPU will push power consumption to stratospheric levels.
+1, it will not make a huge difference. DirectX12 changes nothing about the core Windows kernel. It probably just provides a different - but still high level - job distribution system, but doesn't make the kernel any more modern in terms of real scalability.
On linux, there are no limitations like in Windows as to performance scaling. The consequence is that an FX8350 for instance, runs even hotter in linux than it does in Windows, because all of the performance is used. The FX8350 is a really powerful linux CPU for the money, because the AMD chipsets have all the functionality a modern linux system could use, like for virtualization etc... for a low price, BUT, the price of the cooling solution is higher than on Intel, because linux really makes AMD CPU's work to spec, which isn't the case with Windows. So yeah, the FX6 series is a pretty good value for money, it's cheap, hugely overclockable to a very nice performance level, especially in linux, and it's not that much of a power hog, so works with cheaper motherboards, and doesn't need a very expensive cooling solution. The FX8 series, because they require more expensive motherboards because they use a lot of power, and because they require more expensive cooling solutions, are about as expensive as similar Intel solutions, that still work better in Windows because of the higher single threaded performance.