The FX-8350 still uses the AM3+ socket design too, so those who grabbed a 990FX chipset motherboard can simply update the BIOS and swap out the CPU. It’s priced far more competitively than the FX-8150 too while last year’s top Bulldozer chip went on sale for around £200, the FX-8350 is a far more wallet friendly £150, seeing it go head-to-head with Intel’s Core i5-3570K. With a core frequency of 4GHz (20 x 200MHz) and the ability to Turbo Core (AMD’s version of Turbo Boost) upto 4.2GHz, it’s clocked 11 per cent higher than its predecessor despite the same 125W TDP. The FX-8350 is also a healthy step up the MHz ladder from its predecessor. Improvements have been made however throughout the Piledriver module AMD has also added support for the FMA3 and F16C instruction sets.

Improved scheduling for the floating point unit and integer cores, an improved hardware prefetcher, L2 cache efficiency improvements and faster instruction execution all contribute to the increase in performance over last year’s chips, an impressive feat considering the physical limitations. With the same basic layout, AMD’s improvements have focused on the Piledriver module while leaving the CPU's layout untouched, with many small tweaks adding up to an overall improvement in performance. As we found last year though, this comes at the cost of single-threaded performance and with the down-side that relatively few applications are able to make use of four cores in multi-threaded workloads, let alone eight. This is part of AMD’s design philosophy of focusing on multi-threaded performance, with each module able to process two threads simultaneously.

While AMD markets these as individual CPU cores, each module’s pair of integer cores shares a number of resources, including the fetch and decode units, a Floating Point scheduler (FPU) and 2MB of L2 cache. Piledriver is still based on the same basic design as Bulldozer, with the ‘8-core’ chip containing four Piledriver modules, each of which contains a pair of integer cores. The chip design in mostly unchanged from Bulldozer, with the same layout and cache structure

Amd 8350 overclock settings