Just read the Phenom review here at Tom's and only one thing comes to mind: Wow, Intel's got nothing..............
to fear that is>
The AMD fanboys waited for this?! The 9700 beat the Q6600 in two benchmarks, wow that's pretty exciting if you use those two apps. Not a single gaming benchmark!! Maybe if you write "Native Quad Core" beside the bars where the Phenom loses (which is all but two), it will make them look bigger.
Well I suppose once they (AMD) realized that it was going to suck this bad, they had to switch tactics and claim the compatibility victory. You can just update the BIOS on any AM2 platform and drop a Phenom into it and instant upgrade. Reality check, there aren't many people with AM2 platforms. The greatest amount of AMD systems are owned by those people that got cut adrift with their S939 motherboards. So the upgrade market on AM2 is pretty slim. Trying to convince someone to buy an entire AM2 system for an underperforming CPU is a pretty hard sell. Oh what shall we do, I know, we'll sell our CPU's really cheap. That'll help the bottom line. It's a good thing that AMD switched to 65nm for Phenom.... hope yields are good. Poor AMD can't catch a break.
Funny thing I noticed, seems that even with the IMC, the memory benchmarks seemed to be even poorer than the C2D/Q's. Not that having the IMC really helped the A64's beat the C2D in any realworld benchmarks, but at least from a certain perspective it kept it from looking like a total landslide victory for Intel.
Oh well now that this non-event has past, the next CPU to wait for is Nehelam. I have every confidence that it will outperform the current markets best (which happens to be their own CPU's). Have to have something to wait for. I'm afraid that it's going to be a long wait for the AMD fanboys though. Maybe in that time they'll get tired of waiting and step up to something that really performs. I feel sorry for those that went ahead and built an AM2 system in preparation for Phenom with a placeholder A64, they got royally screwed. Mind you how sorry can you feel for anyone that buys first and see's benchmarks later.
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