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No, AMD's FX "fake" 8-core was more than just 4-cores + hyperthreading. In SMT(hyperthreading) the execution engines, ALUs, FPUs, and caches are completely shared, whereas on FX design, they built two completely separate integer pipelines (schedulers, register files, ALUs, and L1 data caches) inside one module. Only the instruction fetch/decode front-end, the FPU, and the L2 cache were shared. So the FX design would be an in-between a 4-core + SMT and a true 8-core.

by throwawayffffas20 minutes ago|

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Fair, I had not delved into the details, but still they were not full cores and the marketing did not make a real distinction.

I had a pilledriver one, it was a perfectly good cpu, I would buy it again. If I remember back then it was the best overall performance per dollar, the alternatives if I remember correctly were i7-39.. and i7-38.. and were at best 50% more expensive for 10-15% more performance.

by PorciiVorbesc5 minutes ago|

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Depends what you were doing with it. The piledriver only beat the Intels in heavily multi threaded workloads like 3D rendering or media encoding which is why it was popular with media creator workstations on a budget, but for most consumer real world tasks at the time, like video games, Intel was way ahead in performance.

The piledriver would win the bang/buck race back then because of the 6-core part was reasonably priced and unlocked for overclocking, so people would overclock them to beat the more expensive Intels at a lower price, but that ignored the costs of massive power draw, the need for beefier more expensive coolers, and the more expansive AM3+ motherboards built to withstand the higher power draws of the piledriver, so in the end the bang/buck wasn't as huge as people were making it out to be.