X-bit labs

Started by: Joz | Date 01/22/08

Comments: 45 | Last Comment:  02/13/08

[1-15]

1. Phailure!!!!!

I was first to think it, first to say it.

Awesome! LOL...

2. Quote:

Although quad-core Phenom processors cannot boast super high performance, AMD still has a bunch of fans sticking by.


HAHAHA!!! Even Xbitlabs is subtly saying that PHENOM are PHathetic!!!

Well said mate!

They sure are PHathetic and clearly a disappointment!

Please, AMD has done a noble job in this venture. They tried to use state of the art technology to create a competitive product so we the consumers have a choice, not to mention lower prices as well because of them. Before AMD was a true competitor to Intel, I paid $1000 for a Pentium Pro 200MHZ CPU by itself (back in 1996). Now because of AMD I can get a state-of-the-art Intel quad core Q6600 for less than $300. Please stop bashing AMD, even though their Phenom isn't as fast as Intel's offering it still is pretty frickin' fast, and soon to be inexpensive. I have both AMD and Intel CPU's and I find them both to be outstanding.

STFU!

3. 'POORHENOM'
It is hard time for AMD to reveal back his crown!!!

Agree ;)

4. AMD Fanboys.... Let us here you all say... PHailure! yah!!!!


Priceless!!! i'd like to see the look in jorge and tech's faces...

5. I swear, xbitlabs.com is blessed with some of the most immature readers I've seen on a hardware enthusiast website. Jesus!
Look at anandtech or techreport.com readers, for example. For the most part, they write constructive, educated comments. All we have here is AMD bashing. Or, when a review is a little late, the comment section gets flooded with "xbitlabs suck!" type comments. Seriously. Are all of you guys like, twelve years old?

Anyway, to the xbitlabs.com team, great review! Keep up the good work. There's no doubt that Intel's the chip to have right now (I just bought a basic q6600 setup myself to use solely as a Blu-ray to 1080p x264 encoder), but I'm positive that AMD'll bounce back. They made it through the K6 days, after all. The K6-2 was way behind the P2, especially in FP-intensive apps. But in 1999, AMD rather miraculously became FP king with the release of the K7.

What I'm trying to say is, they've pulled themselves out of deeper shit before. Remember the K5?

When compared with the K5, K6 days, AMD has now the advantage that they have a good selling line of processors below the 120$ mark; low margins, but they help bring in the much needed cash.

Agreed, they have pulled out of deeper shit. They are resorting to the same price cutting tactics that Intel did when the Pentium-4 and the Pentium-D were subpar in performance, and this is good for the buyers.

Thats because xbitlabs needs a proper comments section + moderation. Anyone at any time can write anything they want, what do you expect?

The K5 was not as good as the Pentium but ran cooler and more stable than the Cyrix chips if I recall. This made them a good buy in the price/performance area. AMD has been in some deep trouble but they will pull themselves back up again. AMD's only problem is the capacity their fabs have to produce chips. Intel is a much bigger company. They can keep releasing chip after chip after chip whenever they want. When you really think about all this 'competition' its like comparing both [Intel and AMD] to Ford and Chevy. There will always be something each product does better or worse than the other company.

lol u chose the intel quad for x264, which is one of the rare areas phenom trumps intel clock-for-clock

There will always be something the competing product does something better in. Phenom gets some respectable scores when you really look at it. Now lets go back to the Ford and Chevy concept....all cars are used for is to get from point A to point B. Computers use the same concept. As long as it gets the job done at a decent speed IDC if it sucks ass compared to the other company. Intel has some really good products at this time but AMD does not deserve the disrespect it gets. Shoot I'll even use VIA CPU's just as long as it gets the job it was made for done.

"My momma said life is like a box of chocolates".
And Phenom is nothing but a Phailure.

If you don't like a bit of fun in a comment section then go to dailytech, where I find those people to have no sense of humor!

6. X-bit labs still dont get it.

Power consumption measurements on AMD's are only usefull if the whole motherboard power consumption are measured.

All Phenom reviews here sucks, even more than the Phenom.

The values for power consumption are surely measured for the whole system, not the CPU. Even Phenom does not need 284W under load... ^^

7. Impossible phenom loses at winrar bench...
even regular K8 beats conroe

It isn't test in built-in benchmark. It is real compress time of some folder

Those cases where you see Winrar win for K8/Phenom is based on the built in benchmark and not running an actual workload.

If you run a Winrar bench where you actaully compress or decompress files, the Intel architecture wins. A great example of the difference between a synthetic and actually useful software.

8. It seems AMD is cutting its own throat.

9. Good luck with their next architecture. This one sucks, "native quad core" my ass.

Agreed-they should of just combined 2 dual cores as intel does.Native quad core just is'nt
ready for pime-time yet.

The problem of Phenom isn't native quad core..Actually, it is the only thing that works excelent, almost perfect. The multitprocessor scaling is almost linear, very close to 4. Intel's Kentsfields for comparison scales somewhere around 3.6.

The problem is single processing power, which didn't improve much over Athlon 64.

As much as i like and honor AMD, i must say they have very dark times..and i fear future won't bring any good. Intel's new architecture Nehalem strikes already in Q4 2008. And if you look at Intel's roadmap for the next two years, you'll know what i am talking about.

But you know..hardware world is always so full of suprises

Maybe they came out with Black Edition to cover their funeral costs....

10. The CPU presented today is a disaster. I was expecting better overclocking performance from a Black Edition, +300 MHz is nothing. Like the review said, the Phenom 9500 is the only one of the Phenoms that can actually be recommended at this time. Good review x-bit!

11. Wonderful review, just as always. I may say that xbitlabs is one of the very few sites on the web that managed to maintain the professional touch in their articles over the years, providing quality, in-depth information to the serious reader.

Regarding the results obtained - I hardly imagine anyone buying a 9600 right now, but the idea of getting a 9500 sounds rather realistic to me. It isn't always going to be that bad for AMD, and investing in a good mainboard now may prove to be a nice move some time later on this year.

12. What's the point of releasing a Black Edition processor if it overclocks just the same as a regular one? Unlocked multipliers mean nothing if it physically can't go above certain frequency.

Another marketing gimmick from AMD. Maybe if they stopped lying to their customers, they could actually sell some processors (at least to the fanbase)

Exaqctly my thoughts!!! I mean, common! This black edition is worse than the dual core celeron of the intel....What's wrong with this picture..._??!??

Except that the black edition is priced the same as the regular. In other words, they are just labeling which ones have the unlocked multiplier.

13. - if this was a test of the Phenom in the Spider Platform, shouldn't a ATI 3800 series video card be used? Spider platform is suppose to be a synergistic effect between Phenom CPU, 790fx mb, and ATI 3800 gpu (with the ability to go up to 4). Just curious why the ATI video card was not used.

Because they are reviewing CPU's and Chipsets not Graphics, FOOL! And there is no synergistic effect in the spider platform lol. Hell, it will probably perform better with Nvidia graphics.

Fuck off moron

REad the article before commenting. Dumb ass bafoon!

14. 1. Not a single memory test? Rightmark is a good one.
(For the future reference)

2. No mentioning that you can over clock "each" core individually.
I am running B.E. Phenom
NB @ 2.2
CPU @ 2.5 stock volts (both)
Prime/AOD /3dMark stable,
on Asus m3a with beta BIOS.
And you do get a nice performance increase with higher NB speed.
Only had the cpu for a couple of days,just getting started with it.
Anyway the:
"catastrophic results" term is a bit overboard.
I mean if the cpu died during testing, or something like that, how would you call it then?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not on Intel's side (nor on AMD's), but let's face it: overclocking individual cores simply doesn't make any sense in practice, at least for the tasks that I can think of (it would be very nice if all of them would run fast, not just one, right?). A high score in any synthetic benchmark is just as useless - as long as it takes longer for your work to get done and your CPU drains more power to accomplish it, it's simply not a justified buy. Everyone would tell you that, even some guy who doesn't even know what a CPU is, leaving manufacturers by side.

Good point, and applications that are so old that can't use multithreading don't need a faster CPU anyway

Here is an example :
I want to play game, say BF2 which is not multi threaded, so I set 1 core to 2.5 or whatever and I set the rest to 1000 or less- here is your power savings.
As for the memory K10 is the first (and only?) memory controller(s) that allows for
Reads/Writes at the same time ,and as the author mentioned offers a performance gain for multi threaded environments. Some numbers showing that "gain" ,to the readers here, is what I had in mind.
Now yes Intels offerings are faster then AMDs atm there is no denying there,but how long can beat something to death if it's already dead? (meaning the subject of "who's faster")

Some people here mentioned K5/K6 ,how about something from just 4 years ago?
When the A64 came out (120nm, single channel DDR, socket 754, low clock) it was nowhere near the P4.
What happened? AMD has worked on it,improved it ,refined it and in under 2 years Athlon 64 was the best CPU you could buy.
Is the history repeating itself ?
Let's wait and see what happens ,but I wouldn't write AMD off just yet.

I hope you are right, and soon we have some good CPUs from AMD to choose from again. As for the example you gave - it's a curios idea that I didn't came across before. Despite having to pin your desired process to the appropriate core every time, it seems like a interesting proposition. It's a feature that may become obviously useful if you think of applications like DOSbox, but than again, I would prefer using an older rig for that :)

15. Many phenom users are pissed about their cpus!
If you guys look up "A clock interrupt was not received on a secondary processor within an allocated time. Error 0x101".

You'll get lots of hits with unhappy Phenom users.

Sorry the correct look up is.

"A clock interrupt was not received on a secondary processor within an allocated time".

Here is a long thread about it.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/248265-28-phenom-exposed-shipping-flaky-cores

[1-15]