Phenom reviews!

Disse:
If you were looking for a changing of the guard today it's just not going to happen. Phenom is, clock for clock, slower than Core 2 and the chips aren't yet yielding well enough to boost clock speeds above what Intel is capable of. While AMD just introduced its first 2.2GHz and 2.3GHz quad-core CPUs today, Intel previewed its first 3.2GHz quad-core chips. We were expecting Intel to retain the high end performance crown, but also expected AMD to chip away at the lower end of the quad-core market - today's launch confirms that Intel is still the king of the quad-core market.
As we've seen from our mainstream CPU comparisons however, all of this could change with some clever pricing - something AMD seems to have forgone with its Phenom launch.
Phenom manages to fill a major gap in AMD's desktop CPU product lineup: the company can now offer quad-core CPUs. And with the needed updates to the K8 architecture AMD is now competitive in some areas that it sorely needed improving in. Windows Media and x264 encoding are both strong points of the Phenom architecture, making it on par with Intel's quad-core offerings. The same can be said about some games, but at the same time Intel really pulls ahead in our DivX and other game tests.



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Here's what really frightens us: the way AMD has priced Phenom leaves Intel with a great opportunity to increase prices with Penryn without losing the leadership position. Intel could very well introduce the Core 2 Quad Q9300 (2.33GHz) at $269 and still remain quite competitive with Phenom, moving the Q9450 into more expensive waters. Intel has't announced what it's doing with Penryn pricing in Q1, but our fear is that a weak showing from Phenom could result in an upward trend in processor prices. And this is exactly why we needed AMD to be more competitive with Phenom.
It's tough to believe that what we're looking at here is a farewell to the K8. When AMD first released the Athlon 64, its performance was absolutely mind blowing. It kept us from recommending Intel processors for at least 3 years; Phenom's arrival, however, is far more somber. Phenom has a difficult job to do, it needs to keep AMD afloat for the next year. Phenom is much like the solemn relative, visiting during a time of great sorrow within the family; let's hope for AMD's sake that it can lift spirits in the New Year.

Disse:


Slower, But Cheaper Than Intel's Smallest Quad-Core

The new compatibility concept can save the consumer a lot of money when buying a new CPU or motherboard. The Phenom processor as well as all of the remaining AM2 CPUs can be used on either the new AM2+ boards or the older AM2 platform.
Although AMD's rival Intel has been using the same socket 775 LGA for its CPUs, its constant chipset introductions have also made Intel upgrades a costly affair that went hand in hand with time consuming configuration . AMD wishes to keep its customers and also aims to win disgruntled Intel users over with its compatibility concept. Buyers won't be forced to buy a new motherboard for the 2009 generation of CPUs.
AMD positions its new products in the mid-range segment and is currently not planning to attack Intel's offerings in the high-end. Instead, AMD is offering the most affordable quad-core processor in the market today .
We succeeded in overclocking our engineering sample to 3.00 GHz with only air cooling. Thus it seems feasible that we may soon see Phenom processors running at these higher clock speeds in stores - possibly as an FX version. Indeed we hear that AMD is planning to introduce a Phenom Black Edition this year that will have an open multiplier - which should enable users to hit the 3+ GHz we saw during our tests. The Black Edition will be a 2.3 GHz or 2.4 GHz part. Also, a Phenom 9900 model will be introduced in Q1/2008 at 2.6 GHz, costing less than $350, with the 9700 we tested coming in below $300 (Euro prices are not yet available to us).
We were happy to see AMD present a working, functional and stable alternative to the many complicated and board-specific overclocking utilities . AMD's OverDrive allows the user to monitor the CPU and change its frequency as well as many other parameters such as voltages and bus speeds on-the-fly.
AMD seems to have done its homework when the company set the price for its Phenom processors. 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.[/i]

Disse:
Summarising our thoughts on the Phenom 9600 first, AMD has seen Intel's desktop processor line-up transform from the ageing, slow Pentium to the Core-derived Duo and, a year ago, the Core 2 Quad.

Irrespective of whether you think that Intel's glue-dual-cores-together approach is architecturally inelegant, the fact remains that Core 2 Quad - in both its Kentsfield and new-and-improved Penryn flavours - is a fast and efficient processor in practically every way. AMD tried to match Intel's single-processor performance with its ill-fated '4x4 QuadFather' enthusiast proposition but has had to wait a year before releasing a couple of single-die quad-core parts.

We've disseminated all the various enhancements that make Phenom a better clock-for-clock proposition than Athlon 64 X2. We've identified that the design is elegant and maximises the architecture it's based upon, which remains largely K8. But what we've also seen is that AMD cannot match the clock-speed of Intel's [I]slowest quad-core processor and, worse still, can't match Core 2 Quad's performance on a clock-for-clock basis either.

Put simply, AMD's best quad-core CPU last week was the Phenom 9700. Now, though, it's the Phenom 9600: AMD cannot produce effective yields at 2.4GHz. We can debate all day whether the majority of consumer software is threaded enough to take advantage of four execution cores, but the immutable fact remains that AMD's fastest quad-core offering is slower than Intel's slowest. Compounding this depressing statement for AMD is the January 2008 launch of Penryn-based Core 2 Quads, furthering Intel's performance dominance.

AMD's nascent Phenom also suffers under the considerable yoke of Intel's Core 2 Quad 6600 pricing, which at £165 for a hugely-overclockable 2.4GHz part is something of a bargain. AMD, though, is pitching its slightly underperforming quad-core part at roughly the same price. The industry needs AMD to survive and succeed yet it's very difficult to make a compelling buying recommendation for a processor that's a year behind its competitor - one who has already moved on to a more-efficient 45nm manufacturing process - is between 10-20 percent slower in most benchmarks, and costs much the same.

Our HEXUS.bang4buck graphs show that AMD needs to lower the pricing of the Phenom 9600 to, say, around £135 before it becomes a genuinely viable option to Intel's '6600, should your usage pattern reflect that of a heavy multitasker. If the Phenom 9600's pricing (£159) stays exactly where it is right now, it's a case of too little, too late, we're afraid.

Inextricably linked in with the new processor is the 7-series chipset. We're more bullish for its chances to succeed, primarily due to a lack of current competition from NVIDIA. The 790FX is geared for the enthusiast and is only hamstrung by its poorly-performing southbridge.

Lastly, the Spider platform - where AMD tries to harness the innate synergies of its processors, chipsets and GPUs - can be bettered by a mix-and-match assortment of Intel and NVIDIA hardware, we feel. This conclusion isn't a vitriolic fulmination against AMD at all, folks. Rather, its products, whilst undeniably better than what it's produced before, don't quite match up to the progress made by its immediate competitors in the last 18 months. AMD's running forward in the right direction; it's just that Intel and NVIDIA appear to be sprinting that way too.

Bottom line: the new Phenom quad-core processor and 7-series chipset pack in some potent technology. Trouble is, Intel got there first. You need to be better than the competition if coming from behind: AMD's new launches aren't quite that.[/I]

Disse:
There are a few interesting performance characteristics to summarize in regard to AMDʼs new Phenom processors. First, in comparison to similarly clocked Athlon 64 X2 processors, the Phenoms showed some significant performance gains in the neighborhood of 5% - 9% in single-threaded testing. And in the multi-threaded tests, Phenomʼs two additional execution cores obviously allow it to pull well ahead of any Athlon 64 X2 processor, regardless of frequency. AMD's IPC enhancements are for real.

Secondly, in comparison to AMDʼs previous desktop pseudo quad-core offering, the QuadFX Athlon 64 FX-74 system, Phenom also showed relatively strong performance. In a few tests, namely Crysis, Sony Vegas, and Kribibench, despite a 600MHz – 700MHz clock speed disadvantage, the Phenom systems outpaced the FX-74 setup while consuming much less power.

Finally, we have to compare Intelʼs quad-core offerings to Phenom. In all but a few of PCMark Vantageʼs individual tests, the 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad Q6600 outperformed the 2.4GHz Phenom 9700. Although the Phenom did exhibit measurable IPC improvements over Athlon 64 processors, it seems those improvements arenʼt enough to catch the Core 2.