AMD FX-8350 8-Core Black Edition Processor Review

AMD FX-8350 8-Core Black Edition

Right on the heels of the AMD Never Settle game bundles and the latest Catalyst 12.11 driver announcement last night, AMD is making yet another big announcement tonight! The new AMD flagship processor has arrived! The new flagship codenamed ‘Vishera’ is the first new highend part is a roughly a year. The new AMD FX-8350 features the same ‘Piledriver’ cores that we saw a few weeks back with the AMD A10-5800K APU. One of the upsides to the new AMD FX-Series of processors is that we aren’t looking at a whole new platform like we did with the AMD A10-5800K APU, we can continue to use the AMD 990FX/SB950 chipset motherboards that we have come to love over the past year or so.

The AMD FX-8350 is the first 8-core processor to feature a base clock of 4GHz! The FX-4170 is a quad core processor in the previous generation that comes clocked at 4.2GHz/4.3GHz (base/turbo), but that’s just a quad-core. Having eight cores at 4GHz is impressive, after all it wasn’t that long ago that we were striving to break 4GHz when overclocking.

AMD is launching four new processors tonight, all of them retail less for less than $200. The flagship AMD FX-8350 carries the highest price, and it’s only $195.

• AMD FX-8350 8-core $195
• AMD FX-8320 8-core $169
• AMD FX-6300 6-core $132
• AMD FX-4300 4-core $122

The new AMD ‘Piledriver’ modules are essentially revamped ‘Bulldozer’ cores. There have been a number of improvements made and AMD expects us to see an improvement over processors like the FX-8150 that use the ‘Bulldozer’ core of roughly 14%. If we factor in the new Turbo Core 3 technology we can expect a bigger performance gain according to AMD.

The new FX ‘Piledriver’ processors will be available in All of the new AMD FX processors will be built around the same die which measures ~315mm². The new FX processors will be manufactured using Global Foundries’ 32nm process and consists of ~1.2 billion transistors.

AMD has processors out there for everybody. If you’re looking for the ultimate in speed there is the new FX-Series of processor like we are looking at today. If you are looking for a system to do some gaming on without the added cost of a discrete level graphics card the A-Series APU is a likely a good fit for you. If you simply need a daily driver for surfing the web and other basic task the AMD E-Series could be a great fit as it offers an amazing price to performance ratio. No matter what you need AMD has an option that’s right for you.

AMD FX-Series Processor Specifications

CPU	32nm / AM3+
TDP Configs	95W, 125W
Processor Core	Piledriver (up to 8 Cores), 8MB L2 cache, 256-bit FPUs, 8MB L3 cache
Memory	DDR3, 1333-1866, 1.5V
Performance Management	-Core Level: CC6 Power State -Module Level: L2 Cache power gating via CC6