there are some Phnom (Desktop) "guesstimations" going on.
Final Words
We can't draw too many sweeping conclusions based on the data here today, but here's what we do know:
- Gaming performance is much improved with Barcelona over K8, this is most likely a result of the improvements to the SSE engine and the wider front end of the core.
- Encoding performance is improved (again SSE128 rearing its head), but 3dsmax saw an unexpectedly large performance improvement.
- With a 10 - 15% increase in performance on average, Phenom should be more competitive than K8 was on the desktop (as expected).
Here's where things get complicated; we knew Phenom/Barcelona would be faster clock for clock, it was only a matter of how big of an improvement we'd get. If we are to believe that 15% is the best we'll get on average, taking into account that Penryn is around 5% faster than Conroe, the updated architecture from AMD alone isn't enough to really compete with Intel. In other words, price matters.
We saw how competitive AMD became after the first round of price cuts this year, but after the second set Intel went back to dominating. The trouble for AMD this time around is that Phenom is a much larger chip than the outgoing Athlon 64 X2, whereas Intel's Penryn family will actually be smaller than Conroe. AMD is already losing a considerable amount of money each quarter, so fabbing a larger chip at the same price as current CPUs will only make the situation worse. However, Intel can afford to continue to keep its processors as aggressively priced, especially moving to 45nm.
To put it plainly: Phenom/Barcelona make this price war more difficult on AMD, while Penryn makes it easier on Intel. What's the end game? Is there a solution? We're not sure, all we know today is a starting point for Phenom expectations.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/sh ... i=3092&p=7
With the release of Barcelona (AMD Server)
Well the problem with the anand review is that they were using DDR2 667 ECC. Not really sure how much DDR2 800 non ECC will make, therefore may I suggest that this may not be accurately indicative of how it will perform.
There is also other issues people are bringing up and it borders fud. They are blaming everything from low ram speed, bios issues, north bridged being clocked too low thus cuasing L3 cache latency to be high, southbridge same thing, ect...
At this point it's pretty obvious it's going to be a better match for the current core2duo. However Penryn will probably extend the lead to intels favor.
There is also other issues people are bringing up and it borders fud. They are blaming everything from low ram speed, bios issues, north bridged being clocked too low thus cuasing L3 cache latency to be high, southbridge same thing, ect...
At this point it's pretty obvious it's going to be a better match for the current core2duo. However Penryn will probably extend the lead to intels favor.
Yep, which is why I said they were trying to guesstimate what was going to happen.
Alot of it depends on the pricing model they adapt as well. That is really what killed AMD last summer. Intel forced AMD to slash prices by at least 50%.
Alot of it depends on the pricing model they adapt as well. That is really what killed AMD last summer. Intel forced AMD to slash prices by at least 50%.