On 27/12/2012 7:42 PM, Damaeus wrote:
I'm curious about why there's the AMD FX-8320 Vishera with an Eight-Core
running 3.5 GHZ ($180), while there's also the AMD FX-4300 Vishera with a
Quad-Core running 3.8 GHz. Why is the Quad-Core rated at a higher clock
speed than the more expensive Eight-Core, not to mention the Six-Core
FX-6300, which is also rated at 3.5 GHz?

Well, the more cores there are, the more heat the chip overall
generates. They attempt to stay within a certain power consumption
window with these chips, for example 95W. A chip with only 4 cores will
be consuming less power overall, therefore its clock can be cranked up a
bit more and it can still stay within the 95W power limits, than a chip
with 6 or 8 cores.

Now as for the 6 & 8 core chips having the same base frequency of
3.5GHz, I'm willing to bet that the 6-core has a slightly higher turbo
frequency than the 8-core. The turbo frequencies are a temporarily
higher frequency that can be applied to one or two cores at a time as
the need arises, so those cores would be running faster than the base
frequency. Without looking it up, I'm betting that the turbo frequency
of the 8 core would be 4.0GHz, while the turbo frequency of the 6 core
would be about 200Mhz more at 4.2GHz. That's again because a 6 core
would be generating less heat than the 8 core, so it can have a higher
turbo speed.

The FX-8320 might be more than I want to spend, but I could get the
FX-6300; it's only $10 more than the FX-4300 on newegg.com. ...though the
FX-4300 was only about $79 or $89 a couple of weeks ago. I need choose
something soon before it goes up in price again.

Is a Six-Core at 3.5 GHz going to be faster, overall, than a Quad-Core
running 3.8 GHz?

It depends on your workload. If you have a lot of programs running in
the background, then the more cores there are, the better. If on the
other hand, you just want your foreground program to run at its fastest
possible speed, then it's likely that a lesser number of cores with
faster cores might be the better way to go.

Yousuf Khan