Where its competitor Intel has decided to cut the air cooler out of its enthusiast-targeted Skylake CPU packages, perennial underdog AMD has doubled down. It’s launching a new, more efficient cooler alongside new desktop chips for gamers and non-gamers alike.
The new Wraith is AMD’s best air cooler to date, ships with the FX 8370 octa-core CPU, and is designed to handle its gutsy 125W TDP. With 24 per cent more surface area across its fins and 34 per cent more airflow overall, it’s one-tenth as noisy as AMD’s previous stock cooler attempts on high-end chips. The updated, less hardcore stock cooler shipping with AMD’s mainstream chips doesn’t have a cool name like Wraith — it’s just the company’s new “95W Thermal Solution”.
That’s the cooler that’ll ship with AMD’s new A10-7860K APU, which is a 4.0GHz (turbo-boosted) quad-core with eight 757MHz Radeon R7 graphics cores onboard. At a 65W TDP it’s more than sufficiently handled by the new air cooler. It also supports AMD’s FreeSync variable refresh rate tech out of the box. Mid-February is the projected launch date for that chip; at a $159 RRP it’s barely half the price of the next step up that is the $309 FX 8370.
Another new desktop processor — this one without Radeon graphics onboard — is the AMD Athlon X4 845, the first to use the company’s most-efficient-instructions-per-clock Excavator architecture. At 3.8GHz boost on all four of its cores, it’s an entry-level bargain for gamers that will pair it with a discrete graphics card; you’ll pay just $89 when it’s out in mid-February. [AMD]
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21 responses to “AMD Has New CPUs And A New Stock Cooler”
I opt-ed for the non-K i7 6700 chip, shall I keep the fan that came with it, or is it worth looking at different options? I’m a bit gunshy about doing anything too crazy with the new build so decided that was the safest route.
If you aren’t overclocking I wouldn’t bother replacing the cooler, unless your case has the worst airflow imaginable.
Pirate Pete is right, you’d be silly to waste money on an after market cooler if you’ve bought a non k Intel CPU. Unless you’re after an aesthetically pleasing cooler…
Since you’re not over locking you really don’t need to bother. If you were to it would only be for aesthetics or noise reduction.
I have a non K 3770 and I use corsair H80i. My temps went from 90+ down to mid 60s under heavy load.
I think that was a good reason for me to upgrade from my stock heatsink.
Was it needed? Some would say no but I’m glad to have the piece of mind knowing my CPU wont die on me in Australian summers.
8 Radeon cores on board? Wow.
And it will be as gutless a CPU as everything else AMD has put out since the socket 939 Athlon X2.
http://media2.giphy.com/media/Fml0fgAxVx1eM/giphy.gif
It’s true. AMD haven’t had an IPC competitive part for yonk’s. It’s a total bummer to because it’s really slowed down the rate of desktop CPU development. I miss the early 2000’s when AMD were going to to toe with Intel.
I really hope Zen proves to be something of a massive come back for them. The endless rehashing of the Bulldozer architecture has done nothing but damage them.
Yeah, when it was on between Intel and AMD we had massive jumps in performance at pretty regular intervals.
At the end of 2002, we had the first processor from Intel to break 3GHz, a pretty hectic pace from the 500MHz top of the line processors from1999, just 3 years before.
14 years before the 3GHz P4, the fastest thing you could get was a 20Mhz 80386 processor.
We went from a 20Mhz 386 to a PentiumIV 3GHz, hyperthreaded CPU with onboard maths co-processor in that 14 year period.
Now, 14 years after the 3GHz P4, processor performance gains have slowed markedly, a fair bit of that is probably due to lack of competition.
Hmmm, I’ll agree that lack of competition plays some part in the slowing of development, but it’s not the major one.
Fact is, we’re approaching the limit of performance which silicon can provide. The early days were taking the low hanging fruit but just ramping up the clock speed. Hitting the clock-speed ceiling has prevented that from being used to boost performance as much, so we are having to resort to the vast array of extensions to x86 [most of which rely on vectorisation of some sort, which doesn’t work for all applications].
Yeah but now you can get four 3ghz processors onto the same chip, each with vastly higher actual computing performance, and you get a reasonably capable low-end GPU on the die as well. And at only 65W TDP compared to that first Pentium 4’s 85W.
In the sheer raw performance game, AMD isn’t even in the same ballpark as Intel, sure.
But for the price these are selling at, they are comparable to Intel products of similar price in regards to CPU performance.
The APU’s are actually quite good, too. Their GPU performance is better than intels, and they are really good for running a modestly capable PC without a discreet GPU.
I, too, hope that Zen brings them back on par in the IPC stakes, if anything just to drive development further. Plus, I’d still prefer to support AMD, which doesn’t have to resort to shady business practices, dodgy compiler optimisations, and very anti-competitive behaviour, but that’s a whole other discussion 😉
That was when AMD owned their own foundries, they don’t anymore. They had to sell it off and is now called GlobalFoundries. For the past few years AMD was behind in their process node (because of the foundries they use) , and it’s nearly impossible to compete with Intel while being back of the curve in process technology.
But this seems to be changing now that all the foundries are almost on equal playing fields. Intel also still owns x86. Although AMD64 is now the standard and is used by both companies, it is derived work from x86 and therefore still belongs to Intel.
If AMD get’s bought by someone else, that company won’t be able to make x86-64 parts, because the license is non-transferable.
This is the best thing about having a monopoly, it is never easily overturned.
Intel has 586-86 through to current x86. And AMD actually hold the patent for x86-64. Old x86 structures are now open source.
Intel licenses to AMD the right to use the original x86 architecture (upon which AMD’s x86-64 is based).[83][84] In 2009, AMD and Intel settled several lawsuits and cross-licensing disagreements, extending their cross-licensing agreements.[85][86]
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64
I’m sure it’s quite complicated, but the point is technology isn’t the only contributing factor.
Glad you linked an article you didn’t read fully. Or at least the lead article leading to x64 specifically.
. For some advanced features, x86 may require license from Intel; x86-64 may require an additional license from AMD. The 80486 processor has been on the market for more than 20 years[1] and so cannot be subject to patent claims. The pre-586 subset of the x86 architecture is therefore fully open.
Intel don’t actually own the rights to x86, just some of its advanced features XD, mmx, sse etc. X86 is free to use by anyone with out using the patented extensions.
The lawsuit you also referenced was a claim by Intel that AMD had passed on the patent to a 3rd party for manufacture. Not about the cross patent itself.
If you are going to quote something at least read what you are quoting first.
You seem to be hung on some minute point of a broader argument I made. I am fully aware of everything you are rambling about. But because of the rudeness of your writing I no longer wish to have any contact with you.
I usually prefer it when CPUs don’t come with coolers. That way the asking price is lower and I get to choose my own ‘sink.
These new coolers actually look nice. I’ve always considered amd but the benchmarks make me go with Intel and now I won’t be upgrading platforms for another 2 years so we’ll see how the landscape looks then…hopefully amd will still be around…
PCIe 3.0 or GTFO AMD!