X-bit labs

Started by: Mr. BonBon | Date 12/20/07

Comments: 94 | Last Comment:  05/20/08

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1. Excellent review, and great overclock. It looks like the Q6600 is still the king of the hill. I would at least expect AMD to have the upper hand in power consumption, but they don't seem to have the upper hand in anything.

When was the last time AMD had great TDP's? They've been ridiculously high for quite a while now.

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page 11 error maybe (does not read right)

By the way, Phenom doesn’t look too good even compared with the predecessor – Athlon 64 X2 6400+. The 1GHz clock speed difference and pretty weak optimization for quad-core architecture make dual-core AMD processors much more efficient in games than the new quad-core ones.
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but the amd Quad one is faster then the AMD dual core cpu?

dont ask my why that @& stuff got in there was not there when posting (copy paste form page 11)

2. Well, there you have it. It's hard to understand what exactly went wrong, AMD had plenty of time to make something good. It has a lot of improvements over the K8, so where is the bottleneck?

the speed of the L3 cache is a bottleneck
i also think think L2 and L1 form a bottleneck, only 2 way or something like that, intel's L2 cache is much better
dont forget K10 is only a 3-issue core
all C2D's are 4-issue

first good review i saw for a while from xbitlabs,
congrats

It could be the L3 cache though I remember a lot of people saying that the Phenom's memory sub-system is very well put together. In the review it states that integer units haven't changed at all since K8 so that might be the reason for the lackluster performance. At this point only AMD knows...

I guess that they fell victim to sloth. They were too busy churning out A64s and working on (the now-defunct) K9. If they started working on beefing up K8 gradually instead of after 4 years, they might not be quite so far behind.

Intel had lots of time too and that didn’t stop them to released the Pentium4 and PentiumD junk.

3. now this shows how pathetic the phenom is!!

It shows how pathetic you are!

Phenom technology is indeed pathetic compared to Core 2. The only thing that stands for it is price?!?!
The only thing more pathetic than Phenom is a fanboy's blind dedication to an obviously inferior technology.

haha!!
this is one of the classic examples of AMD's fanboys (customers who are suckers in buying a pathetic product!)

It didn’t stop morons like to buy the Pentium4 and PentiumD, why should they not buy a CPU that is good overall, not junk like the Intel Pentium4 and Pentium D.

it's not AMD Phenom that is pathetic, it's AMD (viral)marketing team that is.

4. Pathetic? All they need to do is stay competetive until they can get their stuff together and roll out a better solution. Pathetic is how they let people like you post worthless crap.

who the Vuck are you ? professor?

they need to rollout another pathetic solution for ignorant customers (a classic example is you!!) to buy!

It's not like this only happens with AMD. Does anyone remember the Pentium 4 HT. WTF wat Hyperthreading. It's like you have 2 cpus in one, only NOT!!! Ahhh I miss the good old days! I wish AMD would bring them back. All well, give them time. Comebacks are one thing AMD is awesome at.

5. Nice review. Sometimes there are...

AMD Phenom's are:
- bugged
- power-hungry
- low performance

Goog luck to anyone who'll buy them... I will wait for that nice Q9450...

Goog luck to you too goog sir.

Even after the introduction and wide deployment of Core2 CPUs, I keep buying AMD's CPUs because I hate monopolies. I cannot just give my money to AMD, so I prefer to support them by buying their nice AMD64 EE CPUs.

sounds like a fanboyish... am i right?

"...so I prefer to support them by buying their nice AMD64 EE CPUs." LMFAO!!!
Their "nice AMD64 EE CPUs" would be much nicer if you'd attach some fur to them so you'll have a "nice" pet CPU to caress!

hahah!! You're a classic example of a stupid AMD fanboy who can't see a real performing product even with all the benchmarks!!


You continue to be a sucker for AMD...

6. The most disappointing aspect of Phenom IMHO is the power draw, especially compared to the upcoming Q9450

7. I'm not disappointed by AMD. People forget that Intel took over three years to develop a decent answer to AMDs Hammers. AMD, on the other hand, has produced the Phenom in just a little over a year, on a much smaller budget. They're working very hard to integrate the CPU and GPU. They are famous for giving the most bang for the buck. One look at the recent $199 Phenom specials should be enough to convince anyone of that fact.

So, people who berate AMD for being "late" are simply not getting the big picture.

AMD does not need to have a faster processer, or even one of equal speed.. All they need is performance that is reasonably close to Intel's, and that can comfortably handle the most demanding games. Millions of computer buffs would prefer to purchase cpus from AMD, the spunky underdog, rather than Intel, the monolithic Goliath. It's human nature.

> 7. I'm not disappointed by AMD. People forget that Intel took over three years to develop a decent answer to AMDs Hammers. AMD, on the other hand, has produced the Phenom in just a little over a year, on a much smaller budget. They're working very hard to integrate the CPU and GPU. They are famous for giving the most bang for the buck. One look at the recent $199 Phenom specials should be enough to convince anyone of that fact.

I have quite an opposite opinion. AMD developed K8 architecture over four years ago and since then they were making only some minor or even unnecessary 'improvements' like socket change (754-939-AM2) or an introduction of new techprocess. That being said they spent most of their effort on improving already matured technology.

I have a feeling that they decided that Intel wouldn't be able to churn anything worth competition, alas, Intel unrolled a very competitive architecture. Those four years should have been spent on developing something much more efficient, yet Phenoms bring slightly hacked K8 architecture. Who needs a 100% memory bandwidth when the computation power hasn't changed at all? Where are all those touted energy preservation features? Right now Phenoms are slower both in performance per watt and performance per core clock - and this fact has no excuses.

@Artem - you're totally right, they have no excuse for being slower both per clock and per watt. You forget one thing regarding the time it took Intel to introduce the Core 2 architecture, they took 3 years for that but the advancement was HUGE compared to their previous best effort. AMD took one and a half years to improve the Athlon and the improvement is SO disappointing! Yes, you are right, they have no excuses...

"has produced the Phenom in just a little over a year, on a much smaller budget."

K8 was released more than 4.5 years ago. What exactly AMD did during these >3 years?

Look again. Intel took over three years to produce a new chip in response to Hammer. AMD has produced a response for Core in just a little over one year.

But, you say, the Core architecture performs better than Phenom! Well it should, Intel had an extra two years to massage it into shape. If they had to debut Core a year after Hammer, you can bet it would have been buggy.

AMD has no reason to make any excuses. They have achieved more with far less than Intel. AMDs R&D budget and engineering staff are far smaller. I've read anywhere between 1/4 to 1/10 the size. AMD produces a really decent chip in 1/3 the time on 1/4 of the resources. That's astounding. I'm still amazed that Phenom gets the performance it does, with only 512k l2 and 2meg l3, vs 12meg in the Penryns. That's efficiency for you.

How about the dreaded TLB bug? Well the official word from AMD is that it is extremely unlikely to occur on the desktop. They regard it as a non-issue. That's why they're still selling the chips. AMD Overdrive has a button to disable the workaround, should you so choose.

A few short days from now I'll be able to pick up a Phenom Black Edition for around $250. It'll drop into my old AM2 mobo, with a simple bios update. I'll overclock it to 3Ghz+. At that point I'll have a system that can run with with the Intel Quads. That's just the B2 stepping. Wait until we see B3 and .45nm.

That's why I like AMD. They keep things lively and deliver great value. In the long run they have always come through for their fans. Even the purchase of ATI has created all sorts of new possibilities. You can't succeed unless you take risks...

I'm mystified by the attitude of Intel fans. Intel chips are top performers, so you would think Intel fans would be happy and somewhat charitable to little AMD. Instead, many Intel fan postings are perilously close to "hate speech". I'm not just saying that as a jab at Intel fans, it's based on observation.

@vext - OK, AMD's accomplishment with Phenom is impressive when taking their less resources into account, but why should I give a f**k when choosing the best performing CPU for my budget????? Trust me, when seeing my applications performing slower than they should, I won't smile with the knowledge that I'm supporting my favorite "impressive" company.
I've never seen any CPU review that offers a graph of performance/"dev staff size". And the reason is simple, only a minor percentage of readers gives a f**k about that.

I hope for AMD's sake, and for the sake of all computer users where ever they are, that AMD won't have only their "impressed" fans standing for them, cause they would collapse in a split second!

As an objective observer (who bought several Athlons when Intel had only P4 to offer), I have to tell you that people in here are jabbing at you AMD fans only because your dedication and arguments for AMD seem quite ridiculous at times.

@eltoro

Much of the criticism about AMD sounds like this: "What went wrong?", "They have no excuses", "They're lying about everything".

In reality, NOTHIING WENT WRONG. They actually have legitimate excuses. They delivered a decent competitor to the Intel Quads in 1/3 the time, with a much smaller budget. If they had the luxury of another 2 years and much larger budget, you can bet the Phenom would be a polished, "killer" product. Moreover, they dragged Intel kicking and screaming to accept a bunch of new technologies: 64bit architecture, mutli-cores, monolitic cores, GPU-CPU fusion, on-die memory controller. They deserve a lot of respect. They went toe-to-toe with the behemoth of CPUs, and bearded Intel in it's own den.

>> OK, AMD's accomplishment with Phenom is impressive when taking their less resources into account, but why should I give a f**k when choosing the best performing CPU for my budget?????

There's very little sensory difference between a Phenom 2.4 and an Intel quad 2.4. Other than encoding, there's almost none. Gaming differences can be made up by changing/adding a graphics card. Moreover, your "best performing CPU" will be eclipsed within a year by the next thing from Intel or AMD. I really feel sorry for the suckers who bought an Intel "X" edition chip. A couple of years or so from now it'll be bypassed by the bottom of the barrel next gen Phenom.

>> Trust me, when seeing my applications performing slower than they should, I won't smile with the knowledge that I'm supporting my favorite "impressive" company.

I'm glad for you!! I'm happy to drop a Phenom BE into my old AM2 board, OC it to 3.0, and call it good. For $250, I can compete with YOUR new Intel Quad.

>> As an objective observer (who bought several Athlons when Intel had only P4 to offer), I have to tell you that people in here are jabbing at you AMD fans only because your dedication and arguments for AMD seem quite ridiculous at times.

Correction: you're NOT any more objective than anyone else. You just have different values. You're willing to put short-term, ephemeral performance differences ahead of supporting a company that deserves support. Let me ask you a question. Do you have the same attitude to your cars? How about your wife and children? You'll swap them if you find the other side has higher performance? I doubt it. That's known as Opportunism. Here's the difference, as noted in Merriam Webster's dictionary:

Opportunism: the art, policy, or practice of taking advantage of opportunities or circumstances often with little regard for principles or consequences.
Loyalty:faithful to a cause, ideal, custom, institution, or product. Loyal implies a firm resistance to any temptation to desert or betray.

I would dump AMD in an instant if I truly felt their products were crap, or AMD was trying to cheat the public. However, I don't see that here. My view is that AMD deserves loyalty.

hey dude!! are you in drugs?!?

quote:: Correction: you're NOT any more objective than anyone else. You just have different values. You're willing to put short-term, ephemeral performance differences ahead of supporting a company that deserves support. Let me ask you a question. Do you have the same attitude to your cars? How about your wife and children? You'll swap them if you find the other side has higher performance? I doubt it. That's known as Opportunism. Here's the difference, as noted in Merriam Webster's dictionary:

Opportunism: the art, policy, or practice of taking advantage of opportunities or circumstances often with little regard for principles or consequences.
Loyalty:faithful to a cause, ideal, custom, institution, or product. Loyal implies a firm resistance to any temptation to desert or betray.

I would dump AMD in an instant if I truly felt their products were crap, or AMD was trying to cheat the public. However, I don't see that here. My view is that AMD deserves loyalty.


YOUR LOGIC is SCREWED!! did you buy your WIFE or KIDS??? do you overclock your wife or pop in a new brain for your wife?!?

That's quite a bit of reaching you're doing to support your argument.

A CPU is not a living thing. Few people put emotional value into a piece of silicon (outside of breast implants, but that's another topic altogether).

In any case, when people choose their actions (or inactions), they choose their consequences. AMD failed to come up with an answer to Intel's product line that would benefit both the consumer and their own business with minimal loss. Therefore, they are choosing the consequences.

If you still insist on using living beings with emotional value to support your analogy, then I'll bite for a bit.

:nibble: :nibble:

Even then, there is a fine line between "support" and "enablement."

Support is when you provide assistance to someone or something that is struggling and can't achieve their goals using their own resources.

Enablement is when you provide assistance to someone or something that perceives itself/himself/herself/themselves as struggling and WON'T achieve their goals using their own resources.

If my children did something that would get them arrested and thrown in jail, depending on what it is, if it is determined to be their fault, I'll let them stay in jail instead of bailing them out. They need to know that if they choose their actions, they choose their consequences.

The same goes for AMD. They deserve some "tough love." If they can't deliver, I won't buy. If they fall apart as a result, so be it. Will I miss them? You bet your ass I would! Do I want Intel to have a monopoly? Of course not! If they do have a monopoly, then the CPU market will remain stagnant. In that state, someone else may rise up to compete and see it as a opportunity for their own ideas to flourish.

You think it takes a year to year and a half to deign, test, manufacture, and introduce a processor? what complete ignorance.... AMD has been working on the Barcelona design well before C2D performance was known, the design goals were already set in stone. They simply did not plan on the major leap forward Intel would take over Netburst and were caught off guard....

8. Just wait when AMD releases new Phenom B3 stepping processor. Probably may have some boost. The L3 bug may have some effects on the tests. I am now onto quad-core processing. It may help me to decide whether to go to intel or amd in near future.

Nevertheless, a nice review. I see intel QC 45nm has good tdp and performance level.

9. "The curtain of mystery has been raised over the new AMD Phenom processor and we a chance to check out this achievement using bare facts and figures. "

Please, bring back (we)'ve got or (we) have. ;-)

It's a very nice article, indeed. Thanks for your insight.

10. The reviewed CPUs do NOT have any bugs either in TLB or L3 cache. A new revision can hardly boost Phenom's performance. So, far K10 family CPUs have shown their deficiency and sub-performance in comparison to Core2 Quads.

Anyway we all should be great thankful to AMD because if it hadn't been here than we would have had to buy P4 like single core CPUs with 150W TDP and $1500 price.

The reviewed CPUs do have the TLB bug, and more then likely had the bios fix applied to them. In other reviews, Phenom was faster then here in Win RAR, and the Spec benchmarks.
Regardless, the Integer units are the problem here. So far from the benchmarks, and code analysis I've seen around, Phenom does some very good work with very complex maths, yet falls flat on its face when dealing with integer, and simpler FP.

Add to that, that when you start to boost HT speeds (also controls L3), chip starts to perform and scale better.

So In short, if B3 allows full speed HT3, and L3 cache, you'll see a bump in performance, especially in Multi Threaded Apps using 4 cores. If not... Hopefully they at least get better clock speeds then now.

Running an Asynchronous L3 cache is STUPID!!! And adds all sorts of overhead to simple transactions that shouldn't be there!!! This is hurting the Phenom greatly, IMHO.

The review doesn't use a BIOS fix for the TLB bug. If the fix would have been used, you would see a really apalling performance in many benchmarks (something like being behind Athlon64X2).

B3 will not improve performance compared to this review.

B3 will improve clock speeds, hence improving performance.

All phenom CPUs have the TLB bug. AMD has made this know. However, they state that it is very unlikely to affect a desktop workload. But the bug is there. Also, the fix has been introduced into most bios at this point so we are likely seeing the 10-20% performance hit from the fix in these numbers.

Techreport did a nice set of benchmarks and explanation of the tlb bug.

http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/13741

11. While perfromance may be a bit lacking here in Aus the $90 price differance between the 9600 and the Q6600 and the ability to drop it into my AM2 board is a real bonus for me. Bugger all stuffing around and a nice boost from my x2 5200

While not a performance winner it does win with my wallet and to me offers great bang for buck

12. Performance per watt shold be tested systemwise. Phenom processors, (and athlon64's) as you probably know, has built in memory controller. And Intel's onboard.

Not performance per watt, sorry.
Power Consumption off course.

13. Who runs at 1024x768? Come on give us some real numbers. You run at such low resolutions to show inflated numbers.

No, that's not why they ran the tests at such low resolution. If you have 2 systems with different CPUs but same GPU (which is the case here), raising the resolution tends to even the score because the graphics card takes up most of the load. So running these tests at low resolution is the only good way of finding out how much beef the CPU actually has.

14. I was hoping the Phenom would give me a nice performance boost by dropping it into my existing setup (AM2 x2 6000+) - but apparently not, the 6400+ competes with the Phenom iin a lot of the tests, pretty sad. Looks like I need a major overhaul - I'll hold off for now.

Excuse me? A 3 Ghz Phenom will give you a substantial boost over your 6000+. Plus you get two extra cores. Just consider it "future proofing".

15. Good review--clears things up nicely regarding Phenom performance. I much appreciate your re-addition of Mathematica into the list of benchmarks. Thanks. :)

16. people must take in account that the phenom was
over clocked to 3gigs and was still behind the
Q6600 now over clock both chips to there max
than see what we have. a complete beating phenom being whipped by the Q6600 hands down

17. I think AMD performance is not what we hope for that can compete side by side with top Intel chip but for long term it will be good to buy AMD chip,they are more friendly in customer needs(future proof) while Intel we must buy new motherboard to support new chip that waste alot of money..For me someone need new computer it is better to buy Intel system (due to better performance) but not lasting future at least 2 1/2 years while AMD who's want to upgrade every 1 or 1.5 years..It's depands on what you will do in future..

I agree with you Marvin

AMD=Future Proof
Intel=Hot performance(not lasting)

Future proof my ass. AMD has a heck of a lot of problems today, while Intel is providing reliable hot-performance with very few weaknesses.

More dumbasses that have no fucking clue

Hav you heard of socket AM3+. What a jerkoff

And to think of the k8!

AMD: SUCKIT 939, 940, am2, am2+!!!!!

INTEL: Slut 775, in overall SAME period!!!

So dont come blabbering about amd futureproff SHI:

yes but 775 does not mean that you can use the next chip that comes out the

evey new Intel CPU has needed an new chip set, thay even screwed Nvidia/customers with the new 45nm chip as thay wired it in an way to make it not work on older boards what i think is pointless

but yes q6600 is an good buy now if your looking for an quad cpu

AMD side
939 is DDR1 at the time was better priced and DDR2 offered no performace boost (would of been less) must admit thay did not keep this socket alive for long and has anoyed alot of customers as thay need to buy mobo CPU and ram to upgrade
AM2/+ (AM2+ IS NOT an new socket) is DDR2 was 1-2 years later on after DDR2 was used by Intel and is very much standed and you can use the New X4 chips or X2 in the same socket beening AM2 or AM2+
AM3 is DDR3 is very £$£$ and is point less at this time but soon as the prices come down AM3 will be there

it realy been nice if there amd chips ths time round was faster but for new PC Intel is better agane (unless your wanting an cheaper PC but still fast AMD is still there) upgradeing tho is if you got an AM2 socket you may only need an Bios update to drop one of these chips in

AMD should be pushing for this fix to come out as soon as thay can B3 stepping should come as soon as thay can make it as for none tech peeps thay not know that thay can use Overdrive to turn the TLB patch off
but the TLB problem will most likey only be an problem if you use VMware or other programs that use VM, as i not seen any reviews of the X4 crashing when thay been testing it (before the TLB patch)

AMD idiots!!! 775 has been around much longer than your crappy Phenoms!!

Yes, but the socket isn't the problem with Intel, it's the chipset and partly mainboards. Older socket 775 mobos (i915/i925X) do not support even Pentium Ds and to have surefire support for Core 2, you need a P965 mobo, and P35/X38 for guaranteed 45nm support. Nevertheless, having the performance crown today is a PR advantage, and right now that is not AMD. I'd like a Phenom system to play with, but right now I'm not buying one because of the uncertainty about the TLB thing and such. Later maybe yes.

AM2 isnt what you think it is!!!


Your crappy phenom isn't even compatible in most AM2 boards even with BIOS update!!!

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/12/26/phenom_motherboards/

18. you want to talk about future proof
talk to the people who bought the
Quadfather and tell them about the
future. AMD is singing the same song
about the future with phenom & spider
platform as they did Quadfather in less
then a year what can you get by way
of the future for this platform (NOTHING).
so don't act like AMD has not left people
with a big zero.

19. What is the point of future proofing if your future is worst than the competition's past?

20. Mainconcept H264 is most taxing software and Phenom scored very well. May be Phenoms next revision become table truner.

Also i have a question since the instructions composing SEE are open standard instructions, why AMD is forbiden by Intel to introduce all the instruction except some allowed.

Does this have something to do with 1995/1999 Intel-AMD secret agreement and court decision. I believe yes. I guess its time AMD should debate on it a little without going into specifics but clear customers of why in case of SSE, AMD seems to be living on charity by Intel.

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