AMD's Phenom Unveiled: A Somber Farewell to K8
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 19, 2007 1:25 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
First Tunisia, then Tahoe?
As a slightly off-topic but important sidenote, I thought it would be appropriate to let everyone know how AMD wanted this review to happen, and how certain folks within AMD were champions for the right cause and made it actually happen.
AMD knew it wouldn't be able to trounce Core 2 with Phenom, especially not at 2.3GHz, so it wanted to control the benchmarking that was done on Phenom. For the first time in as far as I can remember, AMD wanted all benchmarking on Phenom to be done at a location in Tahoe, of course on AMD's dime. AMD would fly us out there, we would spend a couple of days with a pre-configured system and we'd head home to write our stories.
Now I championed for this sort of early-access to Phenom months ago. I've visited AMD alone three times this year primarily to talk about Phenom, and each time I left without being able to report so much as a single benchmark to you all (everyone remembers those articles right?). I tried and tried to get AMD to part with some early Phenom data, because they were losing the confidence of their fan base and that's a sad thing to see for a company that really took care of this community when we needed it most.
After Tahoe AMD would eventually sample Phenom parts so we could test in our own labs, but there was no word on exactly when that would be. Chances are you would've seen a handful of numbers here today if we had gone to Tahoe with a full review of the chip hitting sometime in December.
Needless to say, I wasn't happy. I refused to go to Tahoe.
Don't get me wrong, a free trip to Tahoe is a wonderful thing, but Phenom deserved better. It deserved dedicated testing, it deserved a thorough review, not a quick glance over a couple of days. And I had a feeling that you all would agree. The time for AMD-sanctioned testing expired months ago, if Phenom was launching this week, we were going to have a proper review of it.
These days, AMD seems to be learning a little too much from the ATI way of doing things. If AMD had its way, today's Phenom review would have been done from beautful Lake Tahoe, on a system that AMD built, running at a frequency that isn't launching. Now there's nothing wrong with allowing us to preview Phenom under closed conditions, after all, Intel does it, but that's simply not acceptable for a review of a product that's four days away from being in stores. You all want to see a thorough review of Phenom, not some half-assed preview, definitely not after waiting this long for it.
An AMD rep, familiar with the Tahoe trip, asked me, somewhat surprised, "what, Intel doesn't work like this?".
Sorry to say, Intel doesn't. Today Intel let us preview the Core 2 Extreme QX9770 processor, do you want to know how they did it? The FedEx guy dropped off a chip. No flights to Tahoe, no hotel rooms, no expenses at all. Don't get me wrong, I felt like an idiot turning down a free trip to Tahoe, but it was for AMD's own good. We've all seen the financials, these aren't times to be wasting money on silly trips around the country, it costs less than $30 to ship a CPU and that's all we need.
I get the point of Tahoe, it's to control the benchmarking, making sure we wouldn't be comparing a 2.4GHz Phenom to a 3.0GHz Penryn, but honestly folks - would we really do that to begin with? And I get the idea to wine and dine the press, with hopes of more pleasant reviews with better relationships - but this isn't a product to toy with. We're here to do our jobs and that is to review the product that will carry AMD for the next twelve months, and honestly we can't do that from some lodge somewhere away from our testbeds.
This isn't the first time AMD has heard of this from me, and there are many within AMD who feel the same way. The reason you're finding this rant in here today is because I am concerned for the future of the company. Competition is a good thing, we need to keep it around, but AMD needs to learn from its competitors. Intel and NVIDIA don't try things like this, business is always first with them, frivolous pleasures come next.
To AMD: if you want to be Intel, start acting like it.
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leidegre - Monday, November 19, 2007 - link
I'm currently wondering how much of the cache diff between AMD and Intel is performance related, Intel is shipping CPUs with ~12MB cache, AMD today, still ship 2MB/512K, I'm wondering how much of the gap between AMD and Intel is due to cache sizes?Because if you take away this diff what happens then? I strongly believe that AMD has a good architecture once again, but Intel has a superior manufacturing process, and this makes it possible for both higher clock speeds and larger chace levels, and that is one reason why Intel is faster (amoung some things)
Shadowmaster625 - Tuesday, November 20, 2007 - link
intel designs their cache structure around their manufacturing strengths. AMD designs their cache structure around their manufacturing weaknessess. That's what you get with 2 totally different sized companies.sdmock - Monday, November 19, 2007 - link
The difference cache sizes (between Phenom and Penryn) really doesn't make a significant difference in performance. They both have pretty large caches, and increasing the cache will only decrease the misrate by so much. Their caches are so big that most programs probably don't suffer from capacity misses, or misses from limited space in the cache. Making the L2 cache too big would increase the hit time by too much, so I think this is partly why they're using a L3 cache now.I think the main reason Intel makes its cache so big is for marketing purposes. They've got more transistors than they know what to do with so they just put them in the cache. I think AMD was smart to reduce its cache sizes (I think in K8?) from 1MB to 512KB because it probably didn't make a significant performance difference (don't know for sure though) and it saved them money. Of course it's important to remember that each architecture will use the cache differently.
erikejw - Tuesday, November 20, 2007 - link
Cache makes a larger difference for Intel due to not having an internal memory controller hence the large differences in cache sizes.sdmock - Tuesday, November 20, 2007 - link
Intel's Core 2 processors now offer even quicker memory access than AMD's Athlon 64 X2, without resorting to an on-die memory controller.http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc...">http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc...
Calin - Tuesday, November 20, 2007 - link
There are benchmarks with equal processors (from Intel) differing only in cache size. Usually (in the processors benchmarked, at lower frequencies) the difference is under 10 percent.Maybe in quad cores at higher frequency (2.6 instead of 1.8-2) the difference will be bigger.
fitten - Monday, November 19, 2007 - link
Doesn't matter, unless you intend to buy one of those parts and purposefully disable part of the cache for some reason. You might as well ask "I wonder how much of a gap would be between those parts if a clock cycle was added to the amount of time it took to execute every instruction in the Intel part". The cache is a part of the design (it's just more easily scaled).
I wonder if the Ferarri 365 Daytona would have performed as well if it had only 8 cylinders instead of 12! You gonna buy one and replace the engine in it to find out?
Roy2001 - Monday, November 19, 2007 - link
I still remember AMD's hype. Well, where is the advantage of native quad core? AMD said phenom is 50% faster than Kentsfield, based on simulated data, where is the benchmark?drank12quartsstrohsbeer - Tuesday, November 20, 2007 - link
They probably simulated a bug free phenom :)
soydios - Monday, November 19, 2007 - link
Little bone to pick at the bottom of page 9" "if you're looking at quad-core, chances are that you're doing something else with your system other than game."Future games will use several threads, I'm sure (i.e. Alan Wake). Crysis performance seemed to improve for me when I OC'ed my E6600 to 3.0GHz, holding at a consistent 21-22FPS in the Crysis demo during the more demanding views with my X1900XT. While I'm not exactly running benchmarks under lab conditions, the increase in CPU power did seem to help. IIRC, Crytek has stated that quad cores will be used by Crysis.
Other than that sentence, excellent article, touching on all the major points.
I would like to compliment and say thanks to you for Page 3: First Tunisia, Then Tahoe? The situation and your actions described on that page are a primary reason why you and this site have so much credibility with us, the readers, which is why we come here. Keep it up.