AMD Phenom II Review Thread

[largon]

Chad Boga,
What do you mean "K8 did so well against the P4"?
"Someone" made sure K8 didn't do so well in the market.

[Chad Boga]

Chad Boga,
What do you mean "K8 did so well against the P4"?
"Someone" made sure K8 didn't do so well in the market.

The K8 was clearly AMD's glory days, if performance doesn't matter now, how come it did a few years ago?

[Donnie27]

Just in time to run into 32nm Westmere.

That pricing sets up the Phenom II X4 940 as a direct rival to Intel's Core 2 Quad Q9400, a 2.66GHz processor whose street price is about $269 right now. That's not far from the $284 list price of the Core i7-920, but AMD rightly argues that the additional cost of an X58 motherboard and DDR3 memory puts the Core i7-920 in a different price category. Meanwhile, the 920's closest competition may be the Core 2 Quad Q9300, which sells for around $240-250, although one could make a case for the similar but slightly lower spec Q8300.

This is not that "rightly argues" since AMD and all of their fans are talking about Ph2 compared to Q9550, Q9400 and Q9300. Then that's WTF the price should be compared to, not i7. I visited a bud with Q9550 running at 4GHz, with a $46 3rd party air cooler and $119 mobo with Cross Fire. If i7 isn't the performance comparison, it shouldn't be in the price comparison as well

Oh well, I'll wait for the Q9550 price cuts at the end of this month Too bad Intel doesn't have enough competition to ship the i5's sooner. I'd be on it like a Chicken on a June Bug,

[largon]

I think K8 got "special treatment" because it demonstrated how a comparably tiny company totally defeated the multiple times more resourceful market leader.

[Miss Banana]

Great, so, they can get close to the Core 2 Quad Q9400, with the top end of their CPUs, that means they are about one generation and half behind, the gap is still increasing ...
(Q9400 is in the middle of the Core 2 Quad selection)
I would not call that a success if I was the Green performance guy.
The best way to help them is to stay honnest about it, just my 2 cents. (Remember the Pentium 4 time frame, it takes to understand your problem to fix it, I learned this)

Remember that we are talking about AMD's first 45nm cpu compared to intels matured 45nm cpu's.
Add to this the fact that intel is allready using ddr3 and AMD has yet to reap the benefits of ddr3, and it's easy to see the new phenom will make AMD more competative, not less.

Of course we can keep on whining about how much generations/years/performance AMD is still behind, but while we do that, let's also keep an eye on the direction in which AMD is moving.
Which is currently the right direction as far as I can see.

[Chad Boga]

I think K8 got "special treatment" because it demonstrated how a comparably tiny company totally defeated the multiple times more resourceful market leader.

So rather than its performance being the motivating factor, people flocked to it just because they pulled off a David vs Goliath act?

[Micutzu]

Romanian review:

http://lab501.ro/procesoare-chipsetu...un-nou-inceput

[Chad Boga]

Remember that we are talking about AMD's first 45nm cpu compared to intels matured 45nm cpu's.
Add to this the fact that intel is allready using ddr3 and AMD has yet to reap the benefits of ddr3, and it's easy to see the new phenom will make AMD more competative, not less.

AMD is more competitive today than yesterday vis a vis Intel, but are they more competitive than was the case before the launch of Nehalem?

If the answer to that question is "Yes", then will that competitiveness be maintained for any great length of time when one factors in possibly pricing movements and new products that will launch in the near future?

[Zucker2k]

Remember that we are talking about AMD's first 45nm cpu compared to intels matured 45nm cpu's.
Add to this the fact that intel is allready using ddr3 and AMD has yet to reap the benefits of ddr3, and it's easy to see the new phenom will make AMD more competative, not less.

Yes, and it was the same for 65nm and I bet it'll be the same for 32nm; the fact is that until Intel seriously blunders, AMD is going to have a hard task retaking the performance crown. Personally, I see a very focused Intel beating AMD to the core shrink and maintaining their edge for the foreseeable future.

@Donnie: Where are the usual suspects? It's time to defend their honor.

[Donnie27]

The K8 was clearly AMD's glory days, if performance doesn't matter now, how come it did a few years ago?

Kind of funny isn't it? P4 type arguments for AMD are fair and OK

largon
What do you mean "K8 did so well against the P4"?
"Someone" made sure K8 didn't do so well in the market.

HP and Dell said the K8's platform sucked. Once the platform got better AMD's market position did too. Even with Premium Prices, AMD's market share went from 14.5% to almost 24% and even out sold Intel in the American OEM Desktop market, finally got Dell to sell their systems, became Volume constrained and made money. The only thing stopping them from gaining even more market share was Maxed out production. Conroe change all of that, not back room deals. Even after Conroe shipped, there were back orders for AMD processors that went months without being filled.

[saveus222]

You know , between the 2 you missed the following :

-Q9400
-Q9450
-Q9550
-Q9650
-Q9770

Somehow , you missed the elephant sitting on the sofa in the living room.

From what I've seen , Phenom 2 fights most with Q94x0 and Q9550 , the later having a slight edge overall.

im sorry that was meant to be Q9450.. even then i agree i missed the q9550... what im trying to get at with "have you read the reviews is" different reviewers in that list of reviews are showing different performance levels. theres one that shows the X4 940 is slower than a q6600... so theres no concrete agreed positioning right now.. i guess your facts are from anandtech and toms.. guru3d shows something else. i dono if they got different chips or one used retail while the other used ES.. ???

[G0ldBr1ck]

The Phenom I Overclocks on the newest revisions are getting about as high as these PHII in these reviews. If AMD drops the price even more on the PH I It could possibly have a better price/perf ratio

[largon]

So rather than its performance being the motivating factor, people flocked to it just because they pulled off a David vs Goliath act?

Indeed.
K8 wasn't performance-wise a huge improvement over P4, feel free to look it up. K8 was usually faster in gaming, but in everything else, including professional apps, content creation and popular benchmarks like SPi/3DMark P4 was better. K8's high perf/W and perf/clk were the only striking advantages. But P4 wasn't toothless. Then ofcourse, Intel ran into a power/freq wall with Netburst which put P4 in a standstill and lead to cancellation of the original Nehalem. Figure they were more concentrated on getting Merom out.

So yes, K8 had a halo-effect as "David" which upheld it's image as the performance part - and the halo certainly wasn't dimmed by the technologically idle Intel.

[Chad Boga]

Indeed.
K8 wasn't performance-wise a huge improvement over P4, feel free to look it up. K8 was usually faster in gaming, but in everything else, including professional apps, content creation and popular benchmarks like SPi/3DMark P4 was better. K8's high perf/W and perf/clk were the only striking advantages. But P4 wasn't toothless.

From the moment it was clear what a debacle Intel's release of Prescott was, up until they released Conroe, I never had any interest in Intel as a possible system for myself or any of the people whom I have guided in getting systems.

My recollection is that K8 slaughtered P4 in gaming unless the benchmarking was GPU limited and that it was somewhat even in non-gaming applications.

Review after review chose the K8 as the better chip for the home user, so as you picked up LOE's contention that performance wasn't a factor in the K8's markedly improved marketshare, I would very much disagree with this contention.

Without the performance, K8 would never have garnered so much favourable professional and fan press.

[Mechromancer]

I would like to see a PII with a CoolIT Domino overclocked. I'm seriously reconsidering this expensive Core i7 build I have taped out on Newegg. I only use a computer to surf the net and game so all the extra performance Core i7 gives in synthetic benchmarks isn't what I'm basing my buying decision on. The PII 940 gets the job done with multi-threaded games and I was very impressed with the HL2 scores. I will save $350 by going PII-940 as opposed to Core i7 920 just in motherboard and memory costs. That will allow me to add two OCZ Vertex SSDs and complete this build finally next week.

[demonkevy666]

I don't think putting Westminster out this year is a good idea for intel with the marking going the way it is but that can change.
also it looks there isn't going to a be a second stepping for i7 on 45nm. they're just moving right on to 32nm Westminster

AMD could skip 32nm push a 16 bulldozer out by researching more on 22nm and design and development.

I would like to see a PII with a CoolIT Domino overclocked. I'm seriously reconsidering this expensive Core i7 build I have taped out on Newegg. I only use a computer to surf the net and game so all the extra performance Core i7 gives in synthetic benchmarks isn't what I'm basing my buying decision on. The PII 940 gets the job done with multi-threaded games and I was very impressed with the HL2 scores. I will save $350 by going PII-940 as opposed to Core i7 920 just in motherboard and memory costs. That will allow me to add two OCZ Vertex SSDs and complete this build finally next week.

Phenom II should handle SSD extremely well.

[saveus222]

the lack of high-performance AMD processors inevitably slows down the introduction of new technologies and performance increase in the Intel camp. Therefore, we were hoping until the very last moment that new Phenom II X4 CPUs will start the renaissance era for AMD.

found this quote with the xbitlabs conclusion. lack of amd performance slows down innovation in intel ?? what the hell is nehalem then.. ??

[Chad Boga]

AMD could skip 32nm push a 16 bulldozer out by researching more on 22nm and design and development.

Completely and utterly impractical, I can only imagine you are joking?

[savantu]

...

AMD could skip 32nm push a 16 bulldozer out by researching more on 22nm and design and development.

I didn't know they were involved in the pancake business where moving to a new node is as simple as getting a new frying pan ?

[inCore]

found this quote with the xbitlabs conclusion. lack of amd performance slows down innovation in intel ?? what the hell is nehalem then.. ??

I suppose we could be talking about i5.

[freeloader]

If you read a bit down on the same page, he says 3.9 is not stable.

I am let down by AMD shady marketing lately. That overclocked chip was incredibly cherry picked. Similarly, it looks like leaked overclock score around the net were leaked on purpose, of again, very cherry picked numbers. AMD has done so many dirty leaks.

Atleast Dr Who said his chip was cherry picked.

The general consensus so far, is on air, the phenom II hits 3.7ghz. Certainly not bad, but considering it performs clock for clock a little worse than c2q and c2q are known to hit higher clocks than 3.7, its honestly, just enough to be competitive. If one wants the best performance, even for the dollar(socket 775), without taking into account name of brand, intel is still the way to go.

Phenom II is simply what Phenom should have been. Phenom was hyped to have better performance than the c2 architecture, and it didn't. In this case it matches the c2q architecture(actually a bit slower against the newest revisions). But it is atleast not embarrassing because it can chauk up a couple of very small wins against some of intels products.

To those that say its a affordable alternative to CI7, core I7 performs 22% better clock for clock and overclocks(which is important to the people here) 10-15%. That equates to a 30%+ percent performance delta which means they are not even in the same performance class anymore.

Correction the core i7 has a 22% performance advantage even with a ten percent frequency disadvantage.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...0,2114-10.html

So the actual performance clock for clock is 25%, so we are getting close to a 40 percent performance delta when taking into account max overclocks of both.

Quit your ing whining. AMD shady marketing. They all ing do it, every single manufacturer out there. They all ing cheat left, right and center and everybody laps it up.

[cegras]

I'm still a bit surprised people are comparing the VID from either companies like they're directly comparable. Different process ..

[Zucker2k]

Quit your ing whining. AMD shady marketing. They all ing do it, every single manufacturer out there. They all ing cheat left, right and center and everybody laps it up.

Dude, relax it's just hardware. On a side note, did anybody take a look at the batch consignment of the randomly picked cpus that were tested in the AMD demos? Those may be the ones to get.

[Hornet331]

I'm still a bit surprised people are comparing the VID from either companies like they're directly comparable. Different process ..

Well same could be said about temps, considering the subpar implementation of thermal probes on AMD cpus...

[Morais]

Its already available at newegg, 920 & 940...I cant understand why they are labelled at 125W because all denebs consume less power than high-end yorkies, which are rated 95W....very strange