AMD's Phenom Unveiled: A Somber Farewell to K8
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 19, 2007 1:25 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Socket-AM2+, Not So Positive?
When AMD first started talking about Phenom it boasted backwards compatibility with current Socket-AM2 motherboards, as well as a new Socket-AM2+ platform that would enable higher performance and better power management.
We are currently looking into Socket-AM2 motherboard compatibility, but not all vendors have Phenom-ready code for their motherboards as of today. While Phenom should work in virtually all Socket-AM2 motherboards, it's tough to say which will work by the time you can actually buy these things.
AMD's Spider platform, well, minus the graphics card - the 8800 GTX is still our testbed GPU of choice.
Socket-AM2+ motherboards, most of which are based on AMD's new 790FX chipset, were supposed to bring a tangible performance increase when paired with a Phenom processor. Phenom's L3 cache and North Bridge work on the same power plane, one separate from the rest of the CPU. Socket-AM2+ enables the use of two separate voltages, one for the L3 cache/NB and one for the rest of the CPU, whereas Socket-AM2 motherboards run the entire chip at the same voltage. The original plan was for Socket-AM2+ motherboards to run the L3 cache/NB at a higher frequency than the rest of the chip, unfortunately it looks like AMD wasn't able to make that happen.
Socket-AM2+ in action
Currently, the L3 cache/NB on these chips runs at a fixed frequency that's actually lower than the rest of the CPU frequency: 2.0GHz. We tested Phenoms running from 2.2GHz all the way up to 2.6GHz, and in all cases the L3 cache and North Bridge ran at 2.0GHz. We're not sure if this will ever get fixed, but it's somewhat disappointing as it was supposed to be a major reason for upgrading to Socket-AM2+ (but it's good news for current AM2 owners).
Right now it looks like the only benefit to Socket-AM2+ is support for DDR2-1066, which we've been having problems with internally already. If you've got a good Socket-AM2 motherboard, you may not need to upgrade to get the most out of Phenom.
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Regs - Monday, November 19, 2007 - link
Why wait? Why on earth would you want to wait? Read Anand's rant, which I agree completely with. AMD has become it's own worst competitor. It's bending to pressure and they're steering away from their own customers and focusing in how to "compromise" their competitor.They didn't even know what they were going to launch until the last minute. So why on earth would you want to wait for more broken promises and disappointment? Maybe we should all take a trip to Tahoe. And while we're there, we can take every upper level manager out for a evening of electro-shock therapy.
How can such a customer-centric company, after making a block buster product called the K8, collapse so quickly from pressure? They had a golden hand and folded it. Granted a CEO has to take risks to progress the growth of the company, but what he cannot do is ignore what they were successful at. Like in any business SWOT analysis, starting with strengths and weaknesses, you improve your strengths and risk the weaknesses. For the past 4-5 years, AMD has been risking the strengths and improving their weaknesses.
I've never seen such a failure of upper management since Audigy made the blunder of completely focusing on their strengths and ignoring everything else. AMD has completely lost their competitive edge. Without it, well, you can see with all the red ink AMD has to share with their shareholders.
R&D and it's efficiency is only the tip of the ice burg they'll have to improve. What they have to worry about now is finding a new target market for their processors which by keeping manufacturing prices down could of helped however they completely ignored from day one. They also need to offer better platform support because their major weakness is their manufacturing. To why on earth AMD's marketing department are trying to sell things their manufacturing and partnered chip makers can't deliver is beyond any explanation I can give. They're obviously not setting any real obtainable goals for themselves. They failed every goal this year. The only goal I can see they obtained this year was merging with ATi and doing so just for the sake of growth. Oh yes, and they did shrink to 65nm after all ready switching to DDR2, which made everybody who owned a 90nm DDR2 K8 so enthusiastic to upgrading. (SARCASM).
DrMrLordX - Monday, November 19, 2007 - link
Honestly the only reason to wait is if you're looking to upgrade an existing AM2 system.Tesselator - Monday, November 26, 2007 - link
I wonder if it means anything that there is no such thing as LightWave 9.5??
The highest version is 9.3.1 and it JUST became available 11-20-2007 and there are no "special", "early", or "advanced" releases from NewTek for anyone in any way shape or form. Oh well, it"s good for a chuckle at NewTek I guess. :)
TechLuster - Monday, November 19, 2007 - link
I'm surprised, but happy, that I'm apparently not the only one who remembers the title of Anand's Core 2 review.