I’ve recently acquired a brand-spanking-new AMD FX-8350 CPU as an upgrade to my Phenom II X6 box. All the recent benchmarks of this CPU seem to fairly consistently point to it being a multithreaded monster. Plus, AMD has dropped the price of the new FX CPUs compared to the original Bulldozer architecture parts – and the icing on the cake is that the upgrade path is as simple as performing a BIOS update on my budget ASRock motherboard, and swapping out the old CPU for the new. Bliss!
So, given that AMD’s Piledriver archtecture might be a bit of an unknown as far as compatibility with Illumos and OpenIndiana goes, how does it fare? Well, the system seems to boot fine and run: here is the CPU as detected by Peter Tribble’s Solview app:
8 cores, running at 4.0GHz – good. Let’s throw half a dozen VMs its way and see what happens:
CPU utilization as measured by Solview is in the foreground. I should mention that this is also with a couple of OpenIndiana Zones running: GlassFish serving up a wiki, and a local BIND resolver.
In the time since I’ve installed the CPU I’ve experienced a couple of system freezes, so I’ve disabled core power saving features in BIOS to see if that changes anything. Yes, this is a new CPU architecture on a development build of an OS, but all in all, it’s working fairly well. Assuming I can iron out any stability issues, the FX-8350 is easily an incredible bargain.
Update 1: After further investigating the system hanging issues, it’s not limited to OpenIndiana, and is also encountered with Ubuntu Linux installed. Further updates to happen as I get to the bottom of this :)
Update 2: See here.
Pingback: System hard freezes with the AMD FX-8350 « Dave Koelmeyer
Hi,
I’m considering buy a new PC with the next month with AMD FX8350 or an Intel equivalent, and one of the things I want to do is run some virtual machines with VirtualBox.
The host os will be Ubuntu 12.04, but I’ll probably run at least one virtual machine with Windows 7 or 8. What worries me with the FX8350 is that it lacks Vt-X extension, and this seems to be a requirements for Windows 8 in VirtualBox, so I wonder if this only works with Intel CPUs. Would you have any insights? Thanks.
Thanks for commenting. Although I haven’t touched Windows 8, I would very much doubt that specifically Intel VT-x is a requirement. Unless whatever documentation you are looking at explicitly states that VirtualBox cannot support Windows 8 using AMD-V, then I would not worry about this at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization#AMD_virtualization_.28AMD-V.29
Thanks, I think I’ll go with AMD FX8350 then.
This is the post: http://askubuntu.com/questions/158164/why-cant-i-install-windows-8-in-virtualbox-on-12-04. In the first answer, they said Vt-X & Vt-d needs to be enabled, but it’s possible it also works with AMD-V.
It will work with AMD-V – looking at that post the fix is to simply enable hardware assisted virtualization, in this case for the Intel CPU being used. For AMD CPUs the equivalent feature is AMD-V.