AMD's New release: The Phenom Quad Core

[dysfunction]

Just been reading this article Phenom 9700, AMD's 1st Quad-Core CPU | Tom's Hardware about the AMD Phenom Quad Core 9500.

It says this about it which is quite interesting:

The Phenom 9600 is about 13.5% slower than Intel's Q6600 in our benchmarks. On the other hand, its price is also 13.6% lower than that of its direct competitor. Thus, the two products offer practically the same performance for your money.

The advantages of the Spider platform are that you won't need to buy a new board for future processors , that you can upgrade it to use up to four graphics cards and that the platform is future proof thanks to its support for PCIe 2.0.

Looking into the future with the Spider platform, AMD seems to be the less expensive than Intel, since the chip giant has already announced that its current high-end platform X38 will be incompatible to the next generation of high-end CPUs at the beginning of next year. In the end, if you're looking to make the most of a long-term investment, AMD is without a doubt the better platform choice.

May still go with Intel but keep an eye out on future developments of this....

 

[Chilly]

there is also a bug, the fix for which is a 10-20% performance loss. This chip is doomed without a decent fix. The silicon all the reviewers got was unfixed so while they performed at top speed, the bug was there.

 

[Jonty]

Hi dysfunction

That's interesting news, and we certainly need for AMD to get their act together in order to keep the market competitive.

That said, if you look at the general consensus, the vast majority still favor Intel and their Penryn architecture. If I was buying, I wouldn't personally be willing to choose AMD even with the promise of a future bug fix and cheaper prices. AMD are still plagued by problems, and they underplayed this one at the launch, so it doesn't exactly inspire confidence in them or their products.

Kind regards

 

[GReaper]

More details on the problems here.

Not exactly the best time for AMD. Many delays, poor release, poor product.

 

[Kryten]

Early days yet. I'm hardly rooting for AMD at the moment, their products are currently not up to the standard they need to be at, but pricing is good, bundling them into the same category IMO as Cyrix used to be - you only bought one if you really couldn't afford the alternative.
Not much better with graphics, although the 3870 is a fair performer, nearly at the level of the 8800GT but with a slightly healthier price tag and probably easier to get hold of in the UK.

Phenom may be nothing but a flop at launch, as was said already there have been teething issues stopping the release of the quicker units - but there's certainly promise there. Coupled with the Spider platform which *does* look interesting, enough for me to keep a watchful eye on all it's developments, this has the potential to be the next big thing. What we need is bang for the buck, and 2 companies offering similarly performing products can only be good for the end user - a choice, and price wars as a result. It is however rather nice to have a system where the new Phenom kit works in most existing AM2 motherboards, so this could prove an invaluable upgrade path to those with AMD X2 processors currently.

Lets hope - I'll be watching

 

[GReaper]

Intel will have an increased range of Penryn/Yorkfield processors by the time AMD actually releases more than a couple of processors.

Surely Intel will just drop the prices of their older CPUs which AMD are competing with? Those who can afford it will go for the brand new Penryn/Yorkfield processors, those who can't will go for the existing ones.

 

[Jonty]

Hi guys

The TechReport ran some more tests regarding the bug fix. The results are interesting, but AMD's handling of the situation seems a mess to say the least.

Regarding Intel, they're certainly not standing still. For example, they have the E8400 Core 2 Duo coming next month. It's 45nm, 6MB L2 cache, 1333Mhz FSB, and clocked at 3Ghz (and it's already been overclocked to 4Ghz/1999Mhz FSB without liquid cooling). It should cost around $183, which is good considering the existing 3Ghz E8650 costs around $289.

We'll also have mobile Penryns CPUs and dual-core Celerons all coming next month, so it seems they'll be a little something for everyone (although mobile quad-core chips won't appear until around May).

Kind regards

 

[Kryten]

Interestingly, while a colleague was going through our Dell "scrap" yesterday, a motherboard was pulled out and put to one side that he didn't find familiar.

A search on the Dell part number showed nothing on our database which is only a few weeks old, ditto for the internet - yet the motherboard (Laptop) had some interesting and otherwise unheard of features - including the word "Penryn" near the CPU socket (same socket as normal Core2 mobile processors).
The board physically fits one of the (far) larger XPS laptop cases and I believe it might be an engineering sample or something similar - this is "scrap" that comes from Dell directly.

I'm gonna grab the number today if the board hasn't been thrown, I can't take photos or owt for security reasons
My plan will probably be to build up a half-system if we get a core2 processor in the scrap boxes then I can run some tests on it Unfortunatley I never get screens in that scrap, so can only run on external monitors :|