http://www.techreport.com/discussions.x/13724
Poor form, AMD. Phenom should NEVER have been released in this state, B2 is clearly a problematic and immature stepping. AMD should do the honourable thing and recall these processors IMO, their customers deserve better than this.
Also, handing out review samples that are faster than retail versions borders on unethical conduct. Say what you will about Intel and they shady business practices, but AMD is no saint either.
I just can't fathom what AMD was thinking here. Surely they realise people would notice a 200MHz discrepancy in the NB speed... was the small performance gain in reviews really worth the bad PR image they are getting now? I think not.
To recap, the erratum is a chip-level issue involving the TLB logic for the L3 cache that can cause system hangs in specific circumstances. AMD has a fix for the problem in the works, but it degrades performance. AMD has stated publicly that the workaround can lower performance by as much as 10%, although one source characterized the performance hit to TR as 10-20%.
Saucier clarified the exact nature of the workaround for the erratum that AMD has provided to motherboard makers and PC manufacturers. The fix comes in the form of a BIOS update, and this BIOS patch includes an update to the CPU microcode. This update disables the portion of the chip's TLB logic that is problematic. Saucier noted that the L3 cache "still works" with this logic disabled, and he said AMD has no plans to implement the fix for existing chips in a different way.
We don't yet have a BIOS with the workaround to test, but we've already discovered that our Phenom review overstates the performance of the 2.3GHz Phenom. We tested at a 2.3GHz core clock with a 2.0GHz north bridge clock, because AMD told us those speeds were representative of the Phenom 9600. Our production samples of the Phenom 9500 and 9600, however, have north bridge clocks of 1.8GHz. We've already confirmed lower scores in some benchmarks.
Given everything we've learned in the past few days, our review clearly overstates Phenom 9600 performance, as do (more likely than not) other reviews of the product. We can't know entirely by how much, though, until we can test a Phenom system with the TLB erratum workaround applied.
Poor form, AMD. Phenom should NEVER have been released in this state, B2 is clearly a problematic and immature stepping. AMD should do the honourable thing and recall these processors IMO, their customers deserve better than this.
Also, handing out review samples that are faster than retail versions borders on unethical conduct. Say what you will about Intel and they shady business practices, but AMD is no saint either.
I just can't fathom what AMD was thinking here. Surely they realise people would notice a 200MHz discrepancy in the NB speed... was the small performance gain in reviews really worth the bad PR image they are getting now? I think not.