Steamroller

While I have been happy with my now aging, pre-Ivy Bridge intel processor, I am planning on returning to AMD.  I know, your first thought is "he's gone off the deep end."  You would probably be right to think that, too...

I have a little bit of a soft spot for AMD CPUs.  I admit that is part of my reasoning, if not a GREAT part.  But I fell in love with the idea of the Bulldozer CPU when AMD first announced it years ago.  The technology was different, uniquely AMD.  Even so, I was cautious and did not buy into Bulldozer but instead went with Intel for my current computer iteration, replacing my Phenom 6 core with my 2600K build.  At the time it was the right decision, as Bulldozer's performance was... not good.

When Piledriver was introduced performance (overall) increased between 12% and 15%.  It helped but while heavily threaded applications had soaring performance (even better than the top-of-the-line Intel CPU in some cases), single core execution still fell WELL short of Intels offerings... and unfortunately the vast majority of the applications you use in your day-to-day interaction with your computer execute on a single core.  The top-of-the-line Piledriver (which is the followup to Bulldozer) is about on par with an Intel i3 or a low end i5 as far as non-threaded performance goes.  That's not to say Piledriver is a bust, it isn't.  It out performs the last generation top-of-the-line AMD CPUs (pre-Bulldozer) and in some aspects, such as certain types of encryption/decryption, it out performs Intel CPUs across the board.  It also still performs well in general use, just not on the level of an i7.

HOWEVER... there is hope.  AMD is finishing work on the Bulldozer architecture with its final release, Steamroller.  Steamroller starts "rolling out" late in 2013.  There have been widely varying claims as to the performance of Steamroller which reportedly tweaks the architecture in all the right places to maximize single core performance and instruction caching/access, which have been the weaknesses of this architecture from the get go.

Steamroller fits in the same socket as Bulldozer and Piledriver, AM3+.  So this is my plan:  Build my system based on the best Piledriver CPU available, the FX-8350, and in 6 months when the desktop Steamroller CPU is available, swap it out.  Keep in mind that the top-of-the-line FX-8350 costs about the same as a low to mid-range, locked i5 CPU.  It's very inexpensive.  When the Steamroller arrives it will be about the same price.  I would be able to purchase two CPUs for a little more than the price of a high-end i7.

The rest of the components would be solid... AMD 7970 gHz edition graphics card, decent-speed DDR3 RAM, 2 SSDs in RAID 0 and 2 enterprise class hard drives in RAID 0 for data storage, water-based CPU cooler... and a pretty superior case to hold all the components.

Well, that's it for now... just thought I would share.