The Phenom vs. Athlon Core Shootout

Seems like somebody at THG really has a thing for this Phenom.

Hey, that's nice that it is slightly faster clock for clock, but I don't even trust that. I would be really curious about some of the settings they tweaked such as the NB which AMD reduced to 1.8 from 2.0 in the ES samples. Did THG tweak that back up? From what I read that really knows a few % off the Phenom speed. If suspect they did.

On top of that, why no comparisons vs the faster X2 Chips at full speed?


The Phenom has a shared L3 Cache so the single core got the whole thing. As you add cores, the relative gain from that L3 probably goes down as more cores are competing for that cache. The result would be sort of like taking the L3 cache and splitting it in half.

In fact, the whole Single Core thing was Silly.
Test Using 4cores and 2cores that is how they will be used IRL.
Test at Stock. Test @2.6. Test the X2 @ Stock. Test the X2 @3.4

Why Only Compare on OC'd chip vs an UnderClocked Chip.
I get the point of Clock per Clock per core, but I suspect the much cheaper X2 will win most test of Stock vs Stock and OC vs OC.
The Question is by how much?

I agree with you Zen. I don't see how its achieved anything. And throughout the article they mention that AMD said it was faster the X2 by 20%. In the conclusion they said its not as high as that but didn't table or graph anything to show the actual % difference.

I don't think we really need more articles about the fact that phenom is not as fast clock-for-clock as expected, but like this article, we DO need more helping to figure out WHY it is. Personally, I'd like to know what is going on with the northbridge speeds. If the AM2+ boards are designed to lock the IMC at 1.8ghz, even if the processor is running at 2.2ghz or 2.3ghz, what happens in a regular AM2 board? Does it actually run at processor speed like regular x2's do? The AM2 Windsor chips were known to run slower than 939 chips when the IMC was below 2.4ghz. This seems very similiar, and yet, somehow, no one is talking about it.

It is also good to hear that SOMETHING is going on with Z-Ram. I really expected to see it implemented in some way by AMD by now, especially since they could now use it effectively in GPU's.

you can drop a celron in a quad core mobo too - lol - if you like.
most single core users are on socket 939 - anyone with a decent system with am2 used a dual core - com on thg!

"As a consequence, it is technically possible to deploy a quad core Phenom processor into a Socket AM2 motherboard that has been running an Athlon 64 or Athlon 64 X2 - all you need is a BIOS update"



this is my last word on this subject:

advantage? - its called ddr3! try dropping that in your am2 mobo!

No, everyone will see an upgrade if they use software that optimizes all cores. And yes, AMD does have an advantage over Intel in the upgrading current platforms issue.

If you have an Am2 board, you can drop $199 and get yourself a quad core. Yes you can also do that with some socket 775 boards, but many of the new Penryns are having compatibility issues with current 775 boards. Yes, they may be fixed with a bios update, but that's not a sure thing.

This particular article was an attempt to measure performance increases in the processor's architecture. So they put a single K8 core against a single K10 core to see if the design is more efficient or not regardless of the number of cores it has.

In real world applications, you're right that it is pretty much meaningless.

Well, I feel better knowing that you guys will attack ANYONE with anything positive to report about AMD. That wasn't the worst review I've seen, but it did have some mistakes.

I would have suggested both single and dual core to see what kind of scaling difference there is between the two.

A quick tabulation says K10 is about 20% faster overall, but the memory bandwidth for Sandra is troubling. Nothing should beat a Phenom with 1066 RAM.

What about using both X2 cores and two cores out of the quad showing how L3 between cores affects things?

TBH I don't think even with improved stepping Phenom's performance can increase. Obviously the clocks can be increased. But to what level. K8's were a bitch to get past 3ghz and the k10 arch is still very similar to K8's.

I think AMD knows it isn't going much higher. A 2.6ghz Phenom is called a 9900. Where do you go from there naming wise? They have already said 9X50 is B3 stepping.

What about that TDP on the Q6600? With the new G0 stepping, shouldn't the TDP be 95W instead of the 105W they wrote?

And why no Intel comparison? There was an Intel article on the QX9770 and they used an 6000+ for comparison...

Just use the cpu charts
http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu_ [...] &chart=433

Right Phenom is actually pretty good...a year ago. Because of all the delays, it's still good however it's not that great.

I think THG forgot that Intel is shipping the Q6600, Q6700, ..... right now that destroy the Phenom and AMD does not have an answer in sight for those. If you want a Quad Core Right now, you can do that quite easily on even the old 965 boards.

THG really needs to hire a fact checker for their articles.

While I enjoy the forums, I'm finding the level of articles dropping.
There are still some great writers doing great things.
But I see too many articles with attempts to prove something and designing tests to reach that result.

Having an article comparing the Phenom to the X2 and "OCing" the Phenom and "Underclocking the "X2" is a joke.
I mean why did they just not use an X2 5600+?
I presume because saying it "Beat" an X2 6000+ "sounds" better than beating a slower chip.
At least to those who don't read well or analyze well.

Also failing to detail how they OC'd the Phenom such as NB settings, really leaves ......
Ooops....It looks like THG used an "ES" chip. for the Phenom.
Now, Don't the authors read info about the Phenoms??

Perhaps they are the only Hardware site that did not find out that AMD cut back the NB speeds to 1.8 from 2.0 for stability reasons.

A number of threads are noting that this had really hurt performance.
I wonder if THG cut back the NB speeds when doing the OC's to help ensure a proper analysis?

Or I guess it could just be another part of their OC they did not talk about......
Maybe they knew the issue and cranked it way up, but that means lots of Volts to the NB chip and probably extra chipset cooling.

I guess that one of the points was to give an idea of how the core architectures stack up. Whatever improvements AMD made to the K8 architecture apparently doesn't produce very exciting results -- certainly nowhere near the 40% over clovertown they were toting. Looks like stitching two K8s together might have yielded comparable results.

it does very well at supcom versus the k8, which in my book is the only cpu test worth looking at

If youve played it you will know what it does to a cpu.