I turn mine off when I'm working at Phillip Island for the MotoGP and World Superbikes.  Otherwise it is on 24/7/349.

I'm just hoping AMD produces something faster than Jafo's setup. Then he will have no choice but to abandon Intel. 

Thing is, kona, it's not about AMD beating Intel or the other way around.  Intel make some great processors, and I have one.  No, it's about AMD finally breaking the shackles of its previous builds and producing a truly competitive CPU that not only impresses its own customers but Intel's as well.  Whether people switch from Intel to AMD is not so imprtant right now, but rather that AMD asserts/reinforces itself as a serious contender as a chip manufacturer.

It may be true that Intel has led the way over the last 8 - 10 years, and rightfully so, given the quality and performance of its high-end chips, but AMD has made some inroads with 14nm technology and a new architecture that embraces a fresh momentum going forward. 

It is a new era and AMD has taken the right steps to lift its game and be around for the next... and the one after that as well.

Considering Jafo's setup will be surpassed by Skylake, which comes in the third quarter of this year, before AMD's next generation rolls out in 2016, it's a bit of a foregone conclusion that his system wont be the top of the food chain next year regardless of whether Zen does better or not, unless Intel decides to stick with 4 cores as the max.

Oh how I love it to have so many CPU experts on board.

If there's something I don't know about past, present AND future processors, Somebody here is bound to know the ins and outs of every CPU known to man... AND those that aren't.

And then I wondered as to why this reminded me so much of a necro-thread..... given how such great emphasis has been placed on past performances rather than discussing what the future may hold. 

It eventually dawned on me.... I need to be able to travel forward in time.  Perhaps then I may know as much as the experts here and be truly able to discredit future technology with some degree of confidence, just like them.

Oh, and for anyone who thinks sacasm is the lowest form of wit.... I was being facetious.

People are trashing previous processors, and expressing doubt about their ability to deliver, not trashing future processors.  Maybe Zen will be the best thing since sliced bread, but aside from the economy market they haven't accomplished squat since Intel's Pentium 4 flopped over going with sdram instead of rdram and being unable to actually utilize it's bandwidth capabilities and knock the K8 architecture off it's pedestal.

My old 900mhz Athlon was still operational when my mother switched to a laptop, K7 and K8 are the glory days of AMD, it would be nice to have them back, but their current offerings have been... depressing?  Even the K8 wasn't really the performance beast it looked to be, the problem on the Intel side was that sdram was an absolute dog, even after it went to a double data rate, and the architecture had been based around rdram's superior bandwidth capabilities.  I was running a dual 2.4ghz Xeon workstation, with 512 megs of dual channel 533mhz rdram, and that p4 architecture screamed with the proper bandwidth available.  Of course, the memory chips set me back 500 bucks, even if they did bring twice the bandwidth of their ddr competition, and were still smoking it even when DDR2 released two years later.

AMD has potential to unseat the king of the hill, they've done it in the past, but that doesn't mean we should expect them to just because they say they'll be able to compete for the enthusiast market again.  They're not even claiming it, competing with and surpassing are two different circumstances.  Anyone expecting Zen to be faster than Skylake is setting themselves up for disappointment, because it wont be unless AMD is suicidal and doesn't want to advertise a superior product that will, unfortunately, release after it's competition does.

Maybe!  And maybe Skylake will be a resounding flop.  I hope not, though, because it could well be the next Intel CPU for me, that's instead of the i7 4960X I'd already slotted for my next build.  However, should the Zen prove to be a quality CPU with ample speed and performance, I may just upgrade my AMD machines bit by bit as well.

As for AMD's past offerings, I know they haven't been close to matching Intel's performance, but that was never the claim.  I've been an AMD user since the early Athlon days and, apart from one 939 socket CPU, which was discontinued shortly threafter, and thus, compatible motherboards disappeared also, I've been more than satisfied with my AMD purchases, with the FX 8350 more than adequately meeting my needs. 

I don't do any serious gaming, so that has never been an issue... an old P4 box with 2 gigs of RAM and [non-net-connected] XP serves me well enough there.  I do, however, edit and convert video, music and family photos, etc, and the FX 8350 is no slouch.  Put it this way, the i7 4790K might be a tad faster at completing the same or similar tasks, but only by a few nano-seconds, and that I do not mind.  Were the difference to be 20 minutes or up to an hour, well then I'd obviously be looking into a faster, more powerful CPU.

At the end of the day, all but one of my AMD purchases have delivered according to my needs, and if I need a high-end CPU, then I have the 4790K for all those resource intensive tasks that people seem to think the AMD's can't handle.

As for my being facetious, it was done with tongue-in-cheek and was not intended to be taken seriously.... hence the > to denote a bit of silliness.

Because I spoke in the present tense not the future?  Intel's last several releases have been widening the gap and AMD's next great hope isn't scheduled out until 2016.  Somebody referred to it as "dethroning the king".  Yeah, the Athlon 64's did that for a while.  Longer than many expected.  But Intel took their throne back with vengeance and has continued beating AMD while they were down.

AMD has compounded that by making bad business decisions which puts them in a worse situation to try to repeat their performance.  When they pulled off the Athlon 64 they were fighting one war.  Now they are fighting Intel on one front and nVidia on the other and AMD has been steadily cutting their R&D budget.  Intel has literally over 10 times the R&D budget at this point and Skylake is expected to beat Zen to the market.  That gives AMD a pretty big mountain to climb.  It would be great if Zen does exactly what you guys are hoping.  I'm just not going to hold my breath.

The Xeon 5600's are like crack right now.  I can't stop buying them.  I've got Xeon's in 7 different computers in my house right now.  On the ones where I don't need max performance, the L5640's are 6 core, 60W parts and can be had for $60.  That gives my servers 12 cores and 24 threads at 120W.  It's glorious.  On the ones I wanted more speed on, the X5680 gets me MOAR SPEED.

It's not just his opinion, numbers back it up.  This is the part where we seem to lose you.  You've made it clear AMD does what you need it to.  Great, I'm happy for you.  That doesn't mean it's a good product, it just means it does what you need to.  I know people who are perfectly happy with their old Atom powered tablets.  That doesn't mean it's a good processor, that just means they have low demands/expectations.  Try something more demanding on your systems and see if you still think they are that closely matched.  Hook a Kill-A-Watt up while you do it too, just for giggles.

You keep trying to dismiss this unrelated to the topic, but it's important because you are only seeing one hurdle that AMD has to jump.  AMD isn't just behind on performance, they are behind on efficiency too and that is not something easy to overcome.  You personally may not care about efficiency (although you should) but every OEM does.  Better efficiency means cooler temps and better battery life on mobile devices.  Intel understands this which is why their focus has almost entirely been geared towards that with the last several generations.  They've been making slight performance increases instead focusing on efficiency and die sizes.  All Intel would have to do right now to completely crush AMD is lower prices.  You say this thread is about what WE might expect from AMD but whenever somebody explains why they have low expectations you try to argue with them.  It sounds to me this thread was supposed to be an AMD fan-boi rally club.  

@ Xavier Mace,

I've had a rough few days healthwise and I'm not up for debating the issue in dept with you.  I neither have the strength or desire.

Thing is, I've already conceded that Intel has had the better of it in recent years.

I've also conceded that AMD did itself no favours during that period.... and was often its own worst enemy.

Point is, that's done and dusted now.  Is there a need to keep rehashing it over and over?

The other point: AMD has a new leadership and a new team of engineers working on 10nm/a new architecture, thus throwing out the old and bringing in a new era.

So, in reality, nobody but AMD knows what Zen will be capable of.  In other words, nobody should be mouthing off using past examples that no longer apply.

Okay, think what you will.  I know the 2 machines, and the FX 8350 iin some ways is snappier than the i7 4790K.  That may have something to do with the Gigabyte GA Z87X UD5H board the 4790K is currently on.  It was the best I could manage at the time, but it should get a performance boost next week when I upgrade to a Z97 chipped board.  BTW, the FX 8350 is on an ASUS 990FX Crosshair V Formula-Z ... just take my word for it,  it fechen flies.

I'm sorry that you've had a rough few days, I hope you feel better.

Past actions is the only thing we have to give us an opinion on what each of us thinks Zen will be capable of.  If you ignore the past, future predictions are based on nothing but guessing and that seems silly.  I could guess Zen will have 10,000 cores but that has no basis in reality.

In regards to the change in leadership, ever heard the saying "Come meet the new boss, same as the old boss"?    We can only wait and see if that's true, but in my experiences working with large organizations even when the man at the top gets replaced it's rare that the new one comes in and goes CHANGE EVERYTHING.

That's my whole point, AMD's past performances are not necessarily anything to go on, not with new management and new engineers working on a whole new die and architecture.  Okay, sometimes the new boss is the same as the old boss, but indications are that a major shakeup has gone through AMD, beginning with the top echelon and going right through those with hands-on roles in development.  If true, those fools who kept rehashing old architectures and old ideas are gone and AMD, realising its past mistakes, has hired better, more efficient people to get the job done.  If/when I can relocate the article I read regarding the new AMD regime I'll repost it here... it is a most interesting read and gives rise to hope and optimism for AMD.

Were they just rehashing the Bulldozer architecture I'd have to agree with you, Zen would be bottlenecked from word go... and you don't win the race by putting new shoes on an old horse.  It's why I keep saying let's wait and see, because we have no way of knowing what Zen will actually be capable of.  It may not be released until 1Q 2016, some months after Intel's Skylake, but one would think that AMD's thinking right now would be more about putting out the best CPU it can in 2016, not on what Intel has done recently and if they can beat it.

Oh, and thanks for your kind words, I do appreciate them.  And yes,  I am feeling better than I was, but the issue remains and I need to get it sorted if I am to enjoy a better quality of life.  I am seeing some new [to me] medicos, however, so my hopes are higher and my attitude [toward it] is more positive.

how revolting!