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AMD launches FX-6350 and FX-4350
It's a nice speed bump, but there's really not that much to see here. An FX-6350 is basically a factory-overclocked FX-6300, and an FX-4350 relates similarly to the FX-4300. While the FX-6300 has a stock clock speed of 3.5 GHz and a turbo up to 4.1 GHz, an FX-6350 bumps those to 3.9 GHz and 4.2 GHz, respectively. Naturally, this extra speed comes at a cost: the TDP is 125 W rather than 95 W.
Even so, 125 W is easy enough to dissipate in a desktop. Better yet, the "new" chips are at the same price as the old ones. New Egg in particular already has an FX-6350 for exactly the same price as the older FX-6300. While an older FX-6300 would probably have been easy enough to overclock to FX-6350 speeds, having AMD do it for you eliminates the need to mess with the overclock yourself.
Comments
I read the press release, and yawned. The only interesting part is that, as of right now, the 6350 and the 6300 cost the same on Newegg.
I have a feeling we're about to see a small permanent price reduction on the 4300/6300 though. Not a firesale level price cut, but probably on the order of $10-15.
I think this is just AMD trying to make some noise to stay in the conversation as Haswell starts to pick up steam.
You might see a performance boost in the ballpark of 20% for purely CPU stuff. For games, it would tend to be less than that because you're likely to be limited by the video card instead.
I wouldn't bother, though--at least, not right now. Wait and see if there's a Socket AM3+ version of Kaveri late this year. If there is, then that will probably be a worthy upgrade, as Steamroller cores are meant to greatly improve performance, while Piledriver was really just there to fix what was broken in Bulldozer.
While that's possible, it's far from automatic. Because the FX-6350 has a higher TDP, there are probably about as many chips that come back from the fabs that can meet FX-6350 specs as FX-6300. AMD might just decide to stick most of the chips that can't meet the higher bins (all eight cores active and/or lower voltage for server chips) in whichever bin people want.
See, for example, how the A10-5800K is the same price as the A10-5700. The former is clocked higher and has an unlocked multiplier, but the latter uses substantially less power. Neither bin is clearly a harder one to meet, and most of the dies that could meet one can probably fit the other. AMD lets you pick whether you want higher performance or lower power consumption, and they'll clock it that way for you without making you pay extra for one choice or the other.
Looks like Ridelynn was right on the price cuts:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-cpu-apu-price-cut,22371.html
I'd think that some of those would have been discontinued quite some time ago. Maybe now AMD just needs to get rid of existing inventory?