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  • lefty2 - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    I'm predicting Bristol Ridge will be just as bad a failure as Carrizo. I.e. the few design wins will only have single DIMM memory and be universally unavailable, buried somewhere in a dark corner of the OEM's website. It's a pity, because both SoCs are very good in their own right.
  • nandnandnand - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    If it's not Zen, it can be thrown straight in the garbage.
  • Samus - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    I still rock a few Kaveri desktops and they are incredibly powerful for the price. The 860K is half the cost of a comparable Intel chip, which supporting faster memory and a lower cost platform.

    Carizo on the desktop is an anomaly. I'd like to see what it could do with 4MB cache (would require an entirely new die)
  • Lolimaster - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link

    They were nice in 2014.

    We should have a nice 20nm 768SP APU in 2015 with a full L2 cache Excavator and fully mature 896SP 20nm early this year.

    Remember the A8 3870K? That APU was a damn monster only hold back from being godly cause of their sub 3Ghz cpu speed, what we had after?

    400SP VLIW5 2011 --> 384 VLIW4 2012 --> 384VLIW4 2013 --> 512SP GCN 2015 --> 512SP GCN 2016

    Intel improved way faster (non "e" + edram igp's are near A8 level from being utter trash when the A8 3850 was release).
  • The_Countess - Tuesday, July 19, 2016 - link

    yes being able to thrown in a extra billion transistors compared to AMD (1.7 vs 0.75 billion transistors for a quad core with GPU) because of 14nm really does help intel along a lot.

    but as nobody has been able to make a 20nm class process for anything but flash and ram besides intel, AMD's hands were tied. there is nothing AMD could have done to change that.
  • BlueBlazer - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    Formula for failure: FM2 socket (with limited CPU upgradeability), only PCI Express x8 lanes available (which can bottleneck GPUs), and only "4 cores" (which performs more like 2C/4T Core i3 processor).
  • neblogai - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    Bristol Ridge is not FM2; PCI-E x8 can not bottleneck midrange GPUs; ultra low power mobile APU also sold as desktop chip is not a failure, just additional revenue
  • BlueBlazer - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    The results in the article shows otherwise, where AMD's Bristol Ridge was slower in most gaming tests, despite having better performance in some applications. Both FM2 and FM2+ are still the same (legacy) socket. AMD will be probably selling these chips at a loss. Note that these are the same (large) dies as Carrizo chips, and at 250mm^2 coupled with low prices typically meant razor thin margins or none at all.
  • silverblue - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    That L2 cache is probably making more difference than you realise.
  • evolucion8 - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link

    The PCI-E is busted, even at PCI E 2.0 @ 4X, it barely makes a difference on the Fury X and the GTX 980 Ti.
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  • Lolimaster - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link

    They really shoot themselves up allowing those 15w TDP configs with their "high end" APU's.
  • Lolimaster - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link

    That was my point about AMD building their own mobile ecosystem instead of letting OEM's destroy their reputation even more with cr*aptastic offerings.
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  • albert89 - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    Well better late than never for Andantech, but still a great review. As for AMD's Zen, there is much to celebrate and everything they have learned from Kaveri & Carrizo will be put into Zen. But most importantly is AMD's move to 14nm. Which means most reviewers will, for the first time, be comparing apples with apples. Its been a long road for AMD but now that they are here, I can only expect that in many areas of computing they'll give Intel a run for their money and the consumer a taste of the benefits of competition.
  • osxandwindows - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    Yeah, right.
    Keep dreaming.
    Hehe.
  • euskalzabe - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    I'd say the most important part isn't the move to 14nm - that would've happened anyway at this point in time - but the abandonment of the Bulldozer design, finally, into a new CPU microarchitecture and adoption of Intel-like hyperthreading. That's what will shoot AMD CPUs back into competition.
  • The_Countess - Tuesday, July 19, 2016 - link

    actually bulldozer on 14nm would have been a completely different beast. it would have allowed AMD to use far more transistors per core while still making it way smaller in terms of size. that would have allowed AMD to create a far wider execution core, eliminating most of its bottlenecks.

    the high latency cache would probably still means it wouldn't be great for games but for everything else it would be a far more competitive design.

    it is also 14nm that will allow zen to make such a massive leap in IPC's as it will be a very wide Core, while still being pretty small, something that just can't be done on 28nm.

    bulldozer might not have been the best idea, but being stuck on 32/28nm for so long made all it's issues infinitely worse.
  • nandnandnand - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    "Well better late than never for Andantech,"

    There was no point in Adanantech writing this review, because it is a chip for those people too stupid to wait until Zen. Zen is the only thing that matters.
  • BurntMyBacon - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    @nandnandnand: "There was no point in Adanantech writing this review, because it is a chip for those people too stupid to wait until Zen. Zen is the only thing that matters."

    Now, because this review exists, people as yet uninformed have concrete data to avoid decisions that might make them look (as you put it) stupid. There is very much a point.
  • Byte - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    Zen will probably be the RX480 in the CPU world. Better performance, still trounced by the competition, but competently priced.
  • looncraz - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    That would be an improvement on the current situation. AMD is pricing their CPUs quite poorly right now.

    An Intel Celeron G3900 is $50 right now. AMD's closest competition is the A6-7400k - at $55.

    Both are dual cores, both are 65W, both have middling (but usable) graphics performance... quite similar at first glance... except the Intel runs at 2.8Ghz and the AMD runs at 3.5Ghz w/ 3.9Ghz turbo and can rather easily exceed 4Ghz when overclocked.

    Sounds like AMD should be taking home the gold on that one, until you find that the Celeron is nearly 25% faster in single threaded programs and is ~40% faster in multi-threaded programs... Bad deal going for the AMD... especially since the same board that hosts the Celeron can accept much faster CPUs and the AMD board simply doesn't have notably more powerful options available - you can upgrade to a quad core, but you won't be getting better single threaded performance no matter how hard you try. You might break even around 5Ghz, if you can manage it...

    AMD has a 40% clock-speed advantage out the gate, but loses by a large margin.
  • bananaforscale - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    You know what's funny? The fact that if I want to get a CPU that's faster than the FX-6100 I bought almost 5 years ago I still have to pay more than what I paid for it. Sure, Intel gives better single thread performance but I'd get fewer cores and no overclockability. Then there's the fact that I've been running that original Bulldozer with a 20% OC and it seems more stable than at stock clocks.

    Comparing single data points tells nobody a thing. Anyway, isn't that A6 in your comparison unlocked? :P
  • wumpus - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    I'm sure you missed an FX-8320 sale, or you really nailed the low point. Unfortunately Intel can match AMD's performance at nearly the same price, and is cutting off AMD's air supply that way.
  • artk2219 - Monday, July 18, 2016 - link

    Whats crazy is that Microcenter sells the FX 8320E's for $89.99. They also have a motherboard bundle option that you can get for $125 to $170 depending on which board you choose. Theoretically you can get a processor, motherboard, cooler, and memory for the price of a non-K core I5, or just a motherboard and processor for the price of an I3. The unfortunate thing is that not everyone has a microcenter near them, but for the ones that do you can get quite the deal, especially since those 8320E's will easily OC to FX 8350 levels, and more likely 4.2 to 4.6 from a stock clock of 3.2
  • BlueBlazer - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    From the leaks plus AMD's vague announcements, all points to AMD's Zen is going to be quite late (right into 2017). Why put use 28nm "placeholder" for AM4 if Zen is due soon? Also Global Foundries only has 14nm LPP which is a low power process. That may mean the frequency is going to be low (just look at the chips made on 14nm LPP like Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820, or even AMD's latest Radeon RX480). Reference http://semiengineering.com/high-performance-and-lo... quote "The “LP” processes are optimized for low power and feature design rules targeted for the lowest leakage, support lower operative voltages, and tend to have the slowest transistors of the three options".
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  • Chaser - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    Yeah lets celebrate another year of 10 or so of AMD's paper launches of incredible CPUs. Bulldozer was awesome dude!
  • Dr. Swag - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    Yes, the review is finally here! Yes!
  • nandnandnand - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    A review for a chip nobody should buy, because it's much worse than Zen will be.
  • Laxaa - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    I wish there was a AM3+ version of Zen for us stuck on that platform. I'm not that interessted in getting a new motherboard(perhaps I should have stuck with Intel instead)
  • Peichen - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    You should have stuck with Intel. I buy into AMD's upgrade CPU, motherboard at different time scheme and is now stuck with a hot old CPU and a quite new motherboard with unreliable RAID controller. Junk the whole system means I toss out a 1.5 years old motherboard. Upgrade the CPU means not much performance increase and when the board's RAID fail I will have to buy AMD again so I won't throw out a new CPU.

    I wish I pay slightly more for an i3 or i5 and have a reliable media/light-gaming system for 6 years without all the hassle.
  • just4U - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    well.. then you'd have been stuck with a socket 1156 cpu and no board to go with it.. Intel's gone thru what.. 5 socket changes during the last 6-7 years.. There's something to be said for throwing a 2009 cpu into a 2016 board, and it's easy enough to (at some point..) change over to one of their newer processors in that lineup.

    It's also a hit/miss on any hardware. While some go the distance lasting a long time .. other's fail and it's not exclusive to either platform. I use processors from both camps. +/- for both. Just depends what your using your system for and what your expecting to get out of it.
  • pats1111 - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    I don't know why you're whining about a 1.5 year old mainboard. Typically, your NORMAL computer enthusiast is upgrading everything every 2 to 3 years. You have the same issues with Intel, platform changes occur every 1.5 years, and you're stuck with your "old, hot" processor. Wake up and embrace the technological advancement in front of you...
  • Nagorak - Monday, July 18, 2016 - link

    What advancement?
  • artk2219 - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link

    Ding ding ding, we have the real question. Sure skylake is faster than sandy bridge, but compared to the advancement that 4 years used to make in chip tech, its nothing. An average of 25% IPC increase, most of which you can get back by bumping the clocks 30%, which most sandy bridge chips would do easily. Granted with skylake chip is more efficient, with more features, and better a igp, and blah blah blah. But honestly, for most things you would never notice, and dont even get me started on how pointless DDR4 is currently. But even that atleast will mature with time, unfortunately I'm sure you'll need another new socket to really realize its benefits.

    http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-r...

    http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-r...
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  • owan - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    A nice little pop over the previous generation and its still woeful compared to its direct competition from intel. I wonder why AMD even bothered with this product, Intel has a complete stranglehold on the mobile market and AMD's design wins are few and far between. Surely some of the architectural changes could have been rolled into a replacement for their incredibly stale AM3+ products, which have by now become completely irrelevant. I mean, we all know Zen is coming (and I hope its good) but something in the meantime would probably have done more for their mind share than a mobile part.
  • AndrewJacksonZA - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    "I wonder why AMD even bothered with this product"
    Yeah, pretty much what I've been thinking with AMD's CPU launches for a while now. *Surely* they can't be making money on their CPUs compared to how much they spend on researching, testing, producing and then marketing them?

    (Unless there's a market that's low-profile in the media but is lucrative for AMD - perhaps the low budget market in Asia?)
  • patel21 - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    I'm from Asia, India. And here too people are smart enough to ignore AMD even in really low budget systems. And really we still have a complete PC with P4 or C2D easily available around 100$
  • jospoortvliet - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    Compared to a p4 these amd cpu's are amazing... remember that in the time of the P4, amd made the faster more power efficient cpu's.
  • mr_tawan - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    P4 or C2D are worse than every current AMD cpus on the market .... in one or another aspect.
  • BlueBlazer - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    It is called "progress". Both Intel Pentium4 and Intel Core 2 Duo are already out of production years ago. Also it was Intel's Core 2 Duo that blew away AMD back into the stone age a decade ago, and since then AMD has never recovered. AMD's QuadFather FX and Barcelona (especially the TLB bugged ones) are the worst CPUs of their era (quite often was much slower than previous generation overall).
  • bananaforscale - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    P4? Ew. :P (I have a P4D in the other room, it's not really preferable to anything. That if anything is a dead end.)
  • nandnandnand - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    AMD is good in laptops. It will be better when Zen is out. Zen on the desktop may be good depending on the benchmarks and price.
  • mr_tawan - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    I'm from Asia, Thailand. AFAIK AMD is pretty popular among internet cafe' (or should I say... game center instead ?).
  • BlueBlazer - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    Over here, hardly see AMD being used in internet cafes.
  • artk2219 - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    They had too many parts that weren't hitting their mobile TDP's, or they just bakes too many chips than was needed on the mobile side. Either way, why let them sit in a warehouse or toss them at a loss, when for a very smalla mount you can just throw them into your standard desktop package and make some extra sales.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    Carrizo and kaveri did not use hypertransport. They would have to re-engineer their chip to work on AM3+, and to be frank, the AM3+ market is just too small to justify the tiny margins they would get.

    That money is better spent on getting zen out of the door.
  • neblogai - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    Why invest into upgrading bad product, when you can sell the same Bulldozer cores till Zen comes? And this Carriso Athlon is just a by-product of a mobile part and can only be sold for desktop. It all makes sense financially. By the way, new Bristol Ridge AMD 15W APUs are really nice and competitive, but laptop manufacturers are failing again- for example, HP Envy x360 comes with FX-9800P APU- again in single channel memory memory configuration, also with HDD installed and without possibility to use SSD. https://hardforum.com/threads/unboxing-1st-impress...
  • TheinsanegamerN - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    AMD doesnt take the mobile market seriously. If they did, they would be partnering up with the likes of MSI or clevo to produce a good laptop line for their APUs, or at the very least make dual channel a strict requirement.
  • The_Countess - Tuesday, July 19, 2016 - link

    AMD unfortunately can't demand much of anything from OEM's currently.

    and as intel still has a defacto monopoly no OEM wants to piss of intel by making a better AMD laptop.
  • nathanddrews - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    So... will there ever be a desktop Carrizo w/IGP? Much of the hype around Carrizo was focused on its very low power video playback, including H.265 hardware encode/decode.
  • stardude82 - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    Isn't that what Bristol Ridge is? But on the new AM3 socket.
  • Arnulf - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    AM4.
  • Pissedoffyouth - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    Why not bang 8 of these cores into a 125w TDP and make it for FM2+ or AM3+? Finally an upgrade for Piledriver on AM3
  • KAlmquist - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    If you compare the Athlon 845 with the FX-4350 (link below), the Athlon wins on some benchmarks and loses on others. The Athlon has better IPC, but the FX has a faster clock and a 3rd level cache, leaving no clear-cut winner. If we added an L3 cache to the Athlon chip, that would speed it up, but not by a lot. In other words, Excavator is a big improvement over Piledriver in terms of performance per watt, but not much in terms of absolute performance. An Excavator based FX chip (by which I mean a chip with 8 Excavator cores and 8 MB of L3 cache) would probably be a very marginal improvement over the existing FX lineup at stock frequency, and would have less overclocking potential. I can see why AMD decided not to spend the resources to develop such a chip.

    http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1684?vs=127...
  • Peichen - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    I stopped reading at the messy chart where Athlon X4 750 is available from 2 µArch and there is no science to naming. AMD's CPU division was a bigger failure than its GPU division and it still it. I used to have 3 AMD systems at the same time back in 2005 but have steadily moved away and was considering replacing the last AMD system (Phenom II 840) using Prime Day sales.
  • Ian Cutress - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    The 750 and 750K are two different SKUs. As mentioned, trying to find the 750 at retail (and in stock) is *really difficult*, and I'd probably point to it being an OEM-only SKU for a certain design. If anyone has a 750/can find one, let me know.
  • artk2219 - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link

    I found a link for one, but I think its just an OEM one, and it's from Aliexpress, so it may take a while to get to you. I hope I could help!

    http://www.aliexpress.com/item/AMD-Athlon-X4-750-A...

    http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Bulldozer/AMD-Athlon...
  • jefeweiss - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    I don't think poignant is the word you are looking for here. That would be something that makes you very sad, or emotionally touches you deeply.
  • wallysb01 - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    I guess I don't totally understand the comparison to the G3258. I know its a fairly popular processor (I have its non-overclockable little brother, the G3250, and love it in a simple home office set up that I use occasionally for light gaming too). However, its 2 years old. Where is the G4500 or G4520? Supposedly the skylake Pentium would be about 10% faster than haswell, no? And with some perf/W gains too?

    Speaking of which, where's the comparison to Intel in the power consumption? Do I just not want to see that? If in these multithreaded tasks the 845 is chugging along using 80-85 W, while the Intel parts are still near their stated TDP, it more or less invalidates the small performance gain of the AMD chip in those tasks. Looking back at the skylake review, it seems at load the Intel chips might be using anything from 0-20% more than their TDP, this AMD chip is going 30% above.

    I'd love it if AMD could push intel into offering more cores at lower price points, but this doesn't seem good enough to do that....
  • stardude82 - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    Tacking on a G4500 is not terribly pertinent to the task at hand and they are just using archived results here. The comparison from the 2 i3 parts should give you an idea of relative performance. Otherwise, I'm surprised we get such an in depth review from an hollowed out Anandtech.

    You are confusing TDP with total system draw.

    You have a "four core" CPU here for $70, what more do you want? They soundly thrash the dual-core Pentiums and i3s in some well parallelized applications. The problem is the world isn't well parallelized and the CPUs don't have 4 real cores which is why you have i3s still competitive 8 core FX chips.
  • yannigr2 - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    WOW. This is an amazing work. It does explain too much about AMD's Bulldozer versions. It does explain why AMD doesn't bother to bring the full Carrizo line in desktop. It does show, at least from my perspective, that Bulldozer architecture was not a bad architecture to begin with, but a dead end from the beginning.
  • artk2219 - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    Sigh, poor Llano and your FM1 package, always forgotten. Granted it was the last of the stars cores, and not a bulldozer derivative, but it would still be nice to see it included with its brethren.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    The last of AMD's good cores. Mobile Llano was fantastic for OCing and undervolting.
  • artk2219 - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    Indeed it was/is, my fiance is still using my old Asus K53TA. I overclocked the A6 (back when A6's came with 4 cores) in that laptop to run at 2.4 instead of 1.4 for the base, and the turbo to 3Ghz. while overclocking i was able to undervolt at base clocks, and slightly overvolt the turbo clocks. In effect I got better battery life and waaayyyy better performance by just spending a little time playing with the P-States. I still think thats one of the best laptops I've ever owned in terms of reliability and capability, if only it weren't so clunky. Sigh, well you cant have it all.

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
  • coder111 - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    Wow, another Asus A6 user. I still use my K73TA daily. Quite happy with it. Never tried overclocking, but now that you mention it I will.

    How does the cooling hold up? I have had my laptop shutdown several times due to temperature getting too high after heavy APU+dGPU use.

    I just wish there was a way to replace 6550M with something faster...
  • TheinsanegamerN - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    Repaste the parts. The paste on that thing is half a decade old.

    Also, undervolt the chips. You can cut a ton of voltage off of the CPU with k10stat.

    If you really want to go DIY, there are those like me that cut a hole in the bottom of the laptop and put a grill over the fan, that lowered temps by about 20C for me.
  • coder111 - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    Hi,

    Thanks for ideas! I'm on Linux, so I'll see if there are k10stat alternatives on Linux. I'll definitely repaste the parts. And I'll see if I can do the grill on the bottom as well...

    --Coder
  • coder111 - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    Could you post the pics of your grill on the bottom somewhere?

    Thanks
  • TheinsanegamerN - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    That laptop is long gone, im afraid. The chassis did not hold up very well to my constant moving.

    There was a forum on notebookreview about doing said mod, but the pictures are no longer available. the waybackmachine might be able to provide pics.

    http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/k53ta-bbr6...
  • TheinsanegamerN - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    I had the exact same laptop! I went with an a4 to force the dGPU, since AMD kept screwing up the ability to choose which GPU you wanted to use. 3.2 GHz dual core was amazing.
  • Sushisamurai - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    I like this pseudo-new review format. Very clean, and the shout out to manufacture/companies was a nice touch. I think u should include if the SSD's are MLC or TLC In that brief summary for those who forget.
  • keg504 - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    What does OCCT mean? It doesn't seem to be explained in the article
  • Arnulf - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    http://www.ocbase.com/ ?
  • keg504 - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    Ah, thanks. A cursory search of google gave me many different results for OCCT
  • mrdude - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    Fantastic work, Ian. Now if AMD put half as much work into their uArchs as you did into reviewing them, we might finally get somewhere =P
  • Geranium - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    Ian,
    Exynos 7420 and Apple A9 is built on Samsang's 14nm LPE. Exynos 8890 and Snapdragon 820 is built on 14nm LPP.
  • Vlad_Da_Great - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    AMD CPU R&D has been outsourced pretty much close to an 1 year ago. Even Jim Keller left before anything(silicon) was remotely close to be released. AMD has submitted on the CPU front, and now with the another failure from the RX 480 power fiasco it seems in the GPU segment too. ZEN is just a myth for the small minded amoebas. The closest they can come to is Haswell, even in some benchmarks they will be far behind.
    Intel has reported times in many improvement over the 4/5y spam CPU's. AMD can barely get 30% and in some synthetic benchmarks they are below something was produced/developed half a decade ago.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    You have sources for your ludicrous claims?
  • wumpus - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    Zen tapped out. Thus the drawdown. But if you think Zen will compare as well to Intel silicon as the 480 does to the 1060, remember that Intel is still hand-laying out the transistors and AMD is using autorouters.

    Hopefully AMD will at least be able to get back to producing "the cheap stuff', but that is their best hope. They've pretty much surrendered.
  • Calculatron - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    Great article, overall! I am glad to see someone finally review the product.

    I was hoping, however, that you would come across this strange "throttling" issue that this CPU seems to have while playing certain games (not all games, just certain ones). Some people have started threads on Tom's Hardware, and I started one on AMD's own forums:
    https://community.amd.com/thread/198618
    http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-3054721/ath...
  • DominionSeraph - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    Yeesh, the barest overclock physically degrades the processor? This likely means it's degrading at stock as they've pushed a 35W part to 65W and beyond.
  • Sherlock - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    /rant

    Who's your web-designer Anandtech - seriously - I see a big banner at the top & two big ads on the left & right of the page. I am so pissed by the design - I actually calculated the pixel count - only 24% of the screen is dedicated to content - excluding the large Anandtech logo & the menu bars - 10% for the screen is content - please don't kill the site with such crap

    rant/

    Also - "For clarity, hand was from AMD but not Lisa Su's" :)
  • DominionSeraph - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    A narrow column is more readable. Who cares what's on the sides?
  • The_Assimilator - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    Ad blockers are your friend.
  • aryonoco - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    Oh great, another AMD Bulldozer CPU, on 28nm, in 2016.

    I can't even begin to pretend to be enthusiastic about this.

    The only people who will buy this are internet cafe/game centres in developing countries; none of whom care about AT says. I wonder why Ian thought he should spend so much time thoroughly reviewing a part that not one of AT's readers will ever buy.
  • Cryio - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    To be fair this is an architecture from 2015 brought to desktops half-hearted and it wasn't released for any good reason IMO.

    Given the improvements Kaveri and Carizzo pose over the previous generations most of the time, if AMD would have released FX CPUs based on Stream Roller and Excavator, we would've got some interesting CPUs.
  • kondor999 - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    Oh look, another shitty, hot, antiquated AMD CPU that only (gosh, I can't actually think of anyone) would buy.

    I really wish they'd get their act together. Not necessarily because I'd buy their products, but just to force Intel into giving us more than a 3% (or so) IPC iterative improvement.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    So, if you only want AMD to be competitive so that intel is more competitive, how do you expect them to do that when nobody buys their stuff? R and D needs money.
  • silverblue - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    Though temperature readings appear to be a bit hard to come by, the 845 appears to idle at 26 degrees and full load on AIDA64 at 40 degrees which puts it below anything else AMD has, making it comparable to the Pentium G3220 (though the former does have a better cooling solution).

    Source: http://www.eteknix.com/amd-athlon-x4-845-carrizo-p...

    It's up to you whether you want to believe that or not.
  • Meteor2 - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link

    I don't think there's more than 3℅ IPC increase annually available. Apple, ARM, Qualcomm and Intel all seem to be converging at any given power.
  • zodiacfml - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    Waste of time. Yes, it competes with the Pentium, but the Intel chip has integrated graphics which could be useful whether the user has a graphics card or not. Paying more for less.

    Talking about Zen, it will just compete with Haswell generation chips. Intel knew this which is why their tick-tock strategy has slowed down.
  • cocochanel - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    Intel didn't slow down because of AMD. It's because of x86. It's harder and harder even for mighty Intel engineers to squeeze more performance from an antiquated ISA. The fact that Zen took so long to get here it's a clear indication of the same.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Monday, July 18, 2016 - link

    There is no clear indication

    AMD has far fewer resources then intel does, so it makes sense it would take them much longer to make a new CPU arch then intel.

    Intel isnt making any advancements because they have no competition. There may be more performance sitting in their arch they are not using, since there really is no reason to.
  • Lolimaster - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link

    Carrizo totally gimped by l2 cache.

    The problem is that Bristol Ridge comes with the same pathetic 2MB for their 4 cores APU.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Monday, July 18, 2016 - link

    carrizo is gimped because it's a bulldozer product. AMD should have stuck with k10 cores on their APUs.
  • Lolimaster - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link

    Unless they axed BR in favor of non-APU Zen and bring Raven Ridge early 2017.
  • Lolimaster - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link

    They were nice in 2014.

    We should have a nice 20nm 768SP APU in 2015 with a full L2 cache Excavator and fully mature 896SP 20nm early this year.

    Remember the A8 3870K? That APU was a damn monster only hold back from being godly cause of their sub 3Ghz cpu speed, what we had after?

    400SP VLIW5 2011 --> 384 VLIW4 2012 --> 384VLIW4 2013 --> 512SP GCN 2015 --> 512SP GCN 2016

    Intel improved way faster (non "e" + edram igp's are near A8 level from being utter trash when the A8 3850 was release).
  • serendip - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link

    Still not attractive when a cheap Pentium kills it on single-threaded performance, which is what matters in real-world usage. AMD needs to make tablet chips to take the place of Intel Atoms. I'd love to have a 2W TDP APU with double the performance of Atom GMA graphics and similar single-threaded performance.

    One can dream...
  • TheinsanegamerN - Monday, July 18, 2016 - link

    AMD powered surface 4 (non pro model) with LTE would be perfect.

    Too bad AMD abandoned that market. They had a good thing going with their cat cores, but they let that line wither on the vine.
  • leopard_jumps - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link

    Thanks for the review ! You should include Intel i7 for comparison . Here :
    http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_athlon_x4...
  • Meteor2 - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link

    The latest microarchitecture from AMD based on the x86 instruction set was given the codename Excavator, using the fourth generation of AMD's Bulldozer cores, called Carrizo cores.' - Can someone explain that to me? Or are we saying these are Excavator Bulldozer Carizos??
  • Calculatron - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link

    Fourth generation Bulldozer-style cores, named Carrizo.

    The architecture type/family is Bulldozer, this version/generation is called Excavator, and this specific kind of core is called Carrizo. The mobile version is called Carrizo-L, I think?

    If you, or anyone you know, bought an FX-8350, they bought a second-generation Bulldozer product, and it was called Piledriver. Anyone who bought the A10-5800K also bought a second generation Bulldozer product, but it was called Trinity. Both of these were Vishera, since they were second-generation.
  • Lolimaster - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link

    No.

    The 1st APU platform featuring piledriver cores was called Trinity,
    The 1st and only desktop FX platform featuring piledriver cores was called Vishera.
  • Calculatron - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link

    This is correct: I confused, and swapped, Piledriver and Vishera.

    Both the A10-5800K and FX-8350 were Piledriver, but they were Trinity and Vishera, respectively.
  • Meteor2 - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link

    Thanks. It's a little more complex than i3/5/7-nxxx, where n increments by one each generation...
  • TheinsanegamerN - Monday, July 18, 2016 - link

    cariizo cores use the excavator design. excavator is core design, carrizo is the product line.
  • Mokona512 - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link

    Please do this test with the Phenom II series in order to understand the generational IPC changes, and also providing a better point of reference for the Zen CPUs. The Zen claims are based on IPC changes from a CPU series where there was a drop in IPC.
  • Ian Cutress - Monday, July 18, 2016 - link

    I recently redid a Phenom X6 in Bench, though that's absolute chip perf and not exactly what you're looking for, but it's there :)
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    Love spell came out tremendously, I highly recommending robinson.buckler @ yahoo . com for whatever problems you are experiencing in your relationship. He is the real deal. his love spell is absolutely wonderful.
  • lwatcdr - Sunday, July 17, 2016 - link

    I find AMDs low cost offerings really interesting but this just doesn't work for me. The Carrizo on the desktop just seems too limiting. I wish that AMD would update the AM1 line. It is so inexpensive and can support a good number of PCIe lots. For things like a NAS, media pc, or even a Chrome box/low end pc they seem like a really good choice except that they have not been updated in years.
  • silverblue - Monday, July 18, 2016 - link

    Puma+ is kind of like what Atom did with their earlier Atoms, a more efficient version of Jaguar. I'm surprised that they didn't just lock the turbo and produce these in Jaguar's place, unless it's not cost-effective to do so.

    The cat cores are dead now, which is a shame as we never got to see how a dual channel memory interface would improve their performance.
  • Eris_Floralia - Monday, July 18, 2016 - link

    Another great review. I've translated all articles about Bulldozer architecture into Chinese in order to let people know why it didn't success. I believe that an eight-core Steamroller or Excavator would be competitive, but that never comes out.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Monday, July 18, 2016 - link

    it wont be competitive, excavator is still far behind intel is performance and in TDP, and cant overclock at all. And it is still 28nm and cache limited.

    AMD really needs to kill the bulldozer line. It is AMD's netburst.
  • Eris_Floralia - Monday, July 18, 2016 - link

    well, with some adjustments, steamroller can still reach high frequency. with additional L3 and larger L2, the problem with excavator may get solved. I mean that latest bulldozer architecture can do better than present piledriver, but the improvement obiviously doesnt worth a try.
  • Lolimaster - Monday, July 18, 2016 - link

    If they don't put the full 4MB l2 for Bristol Ridge desktop, don't even bother to release it.

    Im actually thinking that they decided to axe BR for desktops and will be focused on Zen FX, survive with FM2+ a bit more for value and then unveil Raven Ridge Zen APU at CES.
  • Visual - Tuesday, July 19, 2016 - link

    The "Pages in this review" links are messed up and lead to one page after what they say.
    In addition, your "remember me" checkbox for login when posting comments remembers nothing.
  • prodikl - Tuesday, July 19, 2016 - link

    Could you guys please add a few more data points in your comparisons, e.g. against an i3, an i7, a celeron, tegra x1 etc. instead of just immediate-neighbor comps? I have no at-a-glance idea of how this stacks up against other CPUs in the grand scheme of things.
  • LoneWolf15 - Tuesday, July 19, 2016 - link

    If I can't get a lower-power desktop variant with the integrated GPU, Carizzo does nothing for me. I'd be happy to swap a Braswell N3700 board that Intel is falling down on with the iGPU drivers (overscan/scalling settings are broken, it's been a year with no fix), but that's what I need to get one of these;; I don't need a desktop unit without a GPU, and I don't need a notebook. I need a media center, and Carizzo would be ideal for it.
  • eek2121 - Tuesday, July 19, 2016 - link

    Nice review on the 1060! Oh wait...
  • jfelano - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link

    Not a gamer, so who cares. AMD continues to smoke Intel at performance per dollar.
  • Xanavi - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link

    Please get rid of Outbrain
  • achamate - Monday, August 22, 2016 - link

    I have no need for Intel CPU, ever, to do everything including heavy applications and games. Maybe benchmarks numbers are not AMD favor, but 99% of users wont see any difference. Save money still on AMD side and I hope stays like that. I do have a laptop with i5, by accident, a very cheap used one but I still use AMD for heavy editing or gaming. If I get a recent generation i7 for free I will sell it, for sure. Again, is probably 99% people out there wont see any difference. Spend your money on video, memory, ssd and hot dogs, thats all. Thanks.
  • h3r3t1k - Wednesday, October 5, 2016 - link

    I'm looking to pair my RX 460 which is PCIe x8 with either the X4 845 or 880K. Should I go for the 845 with this card?
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