Deneb is exposed

Seems like a decent step forward and seems to hang in pretty well with the Penryns, albeit when its running at a faster clock speed. Still, if they are pricing the 3Ghz Phenom2 against the 2.8Ghz Penryn, its a decent alternative.

i7 slaughters all as usual! The Phenom II 940 is simply no competition for an i7 920.
 
No one expected the Phenom II to reach Core i7 levels of performance, at least no one who isn't biased as hell and semi-intelligent. There was never a realistic hint that it could reach that level. The fact now however is that it is very competitive with the Core 2 lineup and has some advantages to those with AM2+ boards. But to be honest I think the line up will be in just as bad of a position come midway this year. The options right now are really rather horrible to be quite honest. AMD appears to have no plans but to really help those AM2+ users except for a very brief period and buying into an Intel system with intentions of maintaining your base system for two years is just... well yeah, not so hot.

Bad market right now.
 
I am hopeful my AM2+ mobo will support a Phenom II. Upgrading my CPU is my next planned move, but a full mobo replacement to go Intel will just be too expensive to manage. Asus has been really good about releasing BIOS updates for my M2N-SLI Deluxe to support everything up to the 9950 Phenom, so Ideally I'll be able spend around $200 and just swap CPUs. I've already got 4 GB of RAM, a Radeon 4850, lots of disk space, etc.

Actually, It's surprising how forward compatible the AM2/AM2+ platform has been. I don't think I've ever even considered a CPU upgrade without swapping motherboards before, and I've been building and upgrading my own systems since my first 486.
 
Low power, low cost, OC's well, pretty good for games and certain applications. Guess the outcome isn't much of a surprise, you can't really expect it to do better clock for clock than Core 2 (not to mention i7) w/ only the memory and cache tweaks we heard about in the days leading up to launch. Competitive pricing is how AMD is playing things and this could prove dangerous since it's Intel's move now and they've had the performance lead for a while now.

There's seems to be about 5% of head room moving to the AM3 platform left from increasing memory controller as well as ram clocks from what AMD indicated. It's unclear where AMD is planning to move this year since Bulldozer is slated for '11. A high-k process in the middle of the year might boost clocks a bit, and Istanbul should offer quad channel memory and some more IPC enhancements but there's been no word of a desktop derivative.
 
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The Anand review is good (I haven't read the others yet).

Its very clear on which parts are competing with which. At the current price points its clear that Phenom II can compete well against the Penryn parts its targetted at. If you were interested in getting one of those parts (the Q9400 or the Q8200), then the Phenom is a viable alternative. Probably even the clear better alternative in the case of the 920.

There are two problems though. For only a little extra cash you can get better performance from the Q9550 and AMD has nothing to offer in that range. But even if your not willing to spend the extra cash, it will only take one relatively small price drop from Intel (which is rumored to occur) to bring the Phenom into competition with the Q9550 and Q9400 respectively. And then it once again becomes an unviable alternative unless your fixed to an upgrade path because of motherboard.

Its definatly a good step in the right direction, but AMD's new architecture can't come fast enough IMO.

Either that, or they need the capability to release faster clocked Phenom II's and be able to lower prices to remain in line with Intel performance. But i'm not sure either their technology, or their margins are capable of that.
 
Well, if they OC well, as has been said, then all they need is to wait a while, cherry pick them and release a higher clocked/BE part which can compete well.

Historically (in the good old Athlon days), AMD had a more efficient architecture and Intel compensated with it's process advantage by clocking higher. Today, it's the opposite and Intel has more efficient architecture. I guess, AMD will have to do very well in the next gen as well just to gain architectural parity.
 
Coppermine was very competitive with K7/K75/Thunderbird even though AMD's was seen as the the "superior architecture". Look back at some old reviews and you'll see that the margin is very, very tight. It was just the first AMD chip to actually compete with Intel's best so people got really excited over it.

I actually think Coppermine was more efficient because it was cooler and basically as fast. It kept up mainly because its L2 cache was superb and the chipset->RAM performance was usually better than the VIA and AMD chipsets managed.
 
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swaaye said:
Coppermine was very competitive with K7/K75/Thunderbird even though it was a "superior architecture". Look back at some old reviews and you'll see that the margin is very, very tight. It was just the first AMD chip to actually compete with Intel's best so people get really excited over it.
Click to expand...

Out of fairness, it wasn't the first AMD chip that was competitive with Intel's best -- look at the AM 5x86 133/150 parts for 486 motherboards and how they competed with the (then-new) Intel P66 and P75 parts. Ever since then they kinda dropped out - mostly in floating point performance rather than anything else - but eventually came back like you said around the K7 days.
 
Albuquerque said:
Out of fairness, it wasn't the first AMD chip that was competitive with Intel's best -- look at the AM 5x86 133/150 parts for 486 motherboards and how they competed with the (then-new) Intel P66 and P75 parts. Ever since then they kinda dropped out - mostly in floating point performance rather than anything else - but eventually came back like you said around the K7 days.
Click to expand...
True. I owned 5x86 and ran it at 160 for years. :) I didn't upgrade until Pentium II. That 5x86 was as good as a P75-P90 for the games that were around before 3D really kicked in.

But with Athlon it was more than just the CPU. AMD defined their own platform for the first time and it was actually of decent quality. AMD had been running on some very low quality platforms (usually Intel's leftovers) before Slot A / Socket A. Not that Socket A and Slot A didn't have problems initially, but it was still way better than most of the Super 7 hardware I've worked with.
 
I never got into the Super7 stuff, but I remember a lot of chipset hell when AMD started the Slot A work. That was one of the primary reasons I was a Slot 1 user instead: too many stories and reviews about VIA and SIS (? I think ?) chipsets sucking unfathomable amounts of canal water even before you started overclocking...

The NForce line was great, but NF2 bit a bunch of people in the ass and made me skip that too. I wouldn't mind owning one of the upcoming SB800 setups though...
 
Socket A came into its own once we had nForce and KT266A around.

I was a 440BX owner until about '01 when I went to a KT133A (Abit KT7A). That board was ok but had the 686B southbridge that gave plenty of people complete hell.
 
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