AMD's Phenom Unveiled: A Somber Farewell to K8
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 19, 2007 1:25 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words
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.
Inevitably some of these Phenoms will sell, even though Intel is currently faster and offers better overall price-performance (does anyone else feel weird reading that?). Honestly the only reason we can see to purchase a Phenom is if you currently own a Socket-AM2 motherboard; you may not get the same performance as a Core 2 Quad, but it won't cost as much since you should be able to just drop in a Phenom if you have BIOS support.
If you ask AMD, this is platform story; after all, who wouldn't want to combine a Phenom with the 790FX chipset and a pair of Radeon 3850 graphics cards. The problem is that you can pair up 3850s on an Intel chipset just as easily, leaving the biggest benefit to 790FX the ability to run 3 or 4 3850s, which we're not even sure is a good idea yet. There are some auto-overclocking features, but talking about Phenom's overclocking isn't really accenting one of its strong points. The platform sell is a great one to an OEM, but it's simply not compelling enough to the end user - if Phenom were more attractive, things would be different.
To make the CPU more attractive AMD desperately needs to drop the price, and from what we've heard, that will happen in Q1. From what we've seen, AMD needs to be at least 200MHz ahead of Intel in order to remain competitive - that means bringing out a Phenom 9900 that's cheaper than the Q6600, at least. If AMD can do that, it's quite possible that in early 2008 we'll have the first sub-$200 quad-core part as the 9500 drops in price.
Oh and just in case AMD is listening: the Phenom 9600 has no business being here, the extra 100MHz only clutters up the product line. Once the 9700 and 9900 are out let's try and stick to 200MHz increments shall we?
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.
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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.