AMD's Phenom Unveiled: A Somber Farewell to K8
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 19, 2007 1:25 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Intel Responds with...really?
Surely Intel wouldn't allow AMD to simply come within the range of being competitive this late in the year. I honestly expected Intel to combat today's launch with something, something serious, something sinister. And indeed it did.
But instead of sampling a Core 2 Quad Q9450, the upcoming Penryn replacement to the Q6600, and instead of even further dropping prices to completely ruin the Phenom launch party Intel responded in a way that actually doesn't make much sense: by sampling a $1000+ Extreme CPU, the Core 2 Extreme QX9770 (click here for our review).
The QX9770, 1600MHz FSB and 3.2GHz, just salting the wounds
Running at 3.2GHz with a 1600MHz FSB (up from 3.0GHz/1333MHz of its recently released predecessor, the QX9650), the QX9770 isn't schedule for release until next year and we do know that it'll carry a price tag of over $1000. The timing of Intel's launch is obviously to disrupt AMD's Phenom thunder, but the most important part of Intel sampling QX9770s has nothing to do with the chips themselves, but rather the act.
Almost as soon as we had Phenom samples, Intel made the decision to sample a CPU requiring a FSB that wasn't officially supported by any chipset at the time. No, 1600MHz FSB support won't come until next year with the X48 chipset, but it didn't matter to Intel; we were getting chips now.
Take a moment to understand the gravity of what I just said; Intel, the company that would hardly acknowledge overclocking, was now sampling a CPU that required overclocking to run at stock speeds. Even more telling is that Intel got the approval of upper management to sample these unreleased processors, requiring an unreleased chipset, in a matter of weeks. This is Intel we're talking about here, the larger of the two companies, the Titanic, performing maneuvers with the urgency of a speed boat.
It's scary enough for AMD that Intel has the faster processor, but these days Intel is also the more agile company.
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Iketh - Wednesday, November 21, 2007 - link
damn where is the rating system??!!strikeback03 - Wednesday, November 21, 2007 - link
If you read the graphs, you will see they are testing total system power draw. Typically they test at the wall with a Kill-A-Watt meter, though this article does not explicitly state that.Assuming the other components were the same between systems, this number then shows the difference in Processor + chipset power consumption between the platforms.
Barcelona is the name of the server processor, ( http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3099">http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3099 ) is one test. Intel power consumption is pretty much screwed by use of the FB-DIMMs.
cyborgtrader - Monday, November 19, 2007 - link
The comments on this topic were great. AMD really let us down on this one. I trade Intel stock, but only buy AMD chips and today I am so dissapointed. I hope AMD read these reviews and get their act together. Patience is a virtue, so I am going to wait for another review after better yeilds have been produced. Guess I can tuck my cash back into my wallet.mmmm, Maybe AMD was joking with this chip. Could Santa be delivering the real Quad? With this reveiew we better hope so.
ct
eye smite - Tuesday, November 20, 2007 - link
I hope all of you choke on your comments. You're completely judging amd on pre production samples that will all mature and give more accurate benchmarks by the time they hit stores. No it's not a core 2 killer but amd never planned for it to be. They laid out a road map some time back and are following it as best they can with the resources they have. It's the first native quad core, intel can't say that. It's brand new, so it's full potential hasn't been seen and probably fully developed yet. You gobshites are just like the rest of America I have to live with everyday and want it NOW. You sound like a bunch of 2 yr olds screaming mine mine.strikeback03 - Wednesday, November 21, 2007 - link
Anand stated that AMD has promised availability by the end of the week, so unless they shipped him below-average samples to test, this is indeed representative of what will hit stores at first. AMD may or may not have planned it as a Core 2 killer, but if Intel outperforms them on speed and power usage at the same prices, who is gonna buy AMD? Being the first native quad-core is an interesting Trivial Pursuit fact, but it won't win many sales unless performance goes up or price goes down.Screammit - Wednesday, November 21, 2007 - link
All we can do as consumers is make educated choices based on the information we can get.Your arguement is "wait and see," which is not a bad position to take, but this is the first TANGIBLE evidence of what AMD can do with its new chips, which most of us have been waiting over a year for. The information we have right now says that the current best AMD quad core chip can't compete in performance with the slowest intel based quad core, which if our information is correct, will cost the same.
By comparison, you can see the first time Anand got a hand on a test sample of Conroe, the results eventually foreshadowed real world performance:
casket - Tuesday, November 20, 2007 - link
I wonder what happened on this test?http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/11/19/the_spider_...">http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/11/19/the_spider_...
Iketh - Thursday, November 22, 2007 - link
the same way cpuz showed the phenom as single-channel memory, this sandra test is probably showing the result from 1 of the memory controllers... thus both channels together are undoubtedly pumping out 10000+, which makes a LOT more sensesdmock - Tuesday, November 20, 2007 - link
So apparently AMD's chips have higher memory bandwidth for integers and FPs. But so what if it ain't faster?stmok - Monday, November 19, 2007 - link
I've waited for Phenom as a potential upgrade to my current three systems (Socket 754 Semprons, AMD64).