New AMD processors impress

Posted by Thomas Gribble in March 28th, 2008

When Phenom launched to limited acclaim in November 2007, many questions were raised by analysts concerned with how the processor war would pan out over the next year. When the infamous (and stupid) TLB bug was uncovered, a lot of people became really skeptical of Phenom’s legitimacy as AMD’s return to competition in the processor realm. Now, a full five months later, various problems for Intel and some clever marketing decisions by AMD have made Phenom a much more viable contender. Yesterday AMD launched a total of seven new Phenom processors that take this charge one step further.

Led by the quad-core Phenom X4 9850, the new AMD processors are based on the B3 stepping, which does away with the TLB erratum that popped up on the B2 stepping. The 9850 has all of the same features as the older Phenoms, but operates at clock speed of 2.5GHz (200×12.5). The 9850 X4 is also a “black edition” processor, meaning the multiplier is unlocked. AMD’s BE processors are designed to bring full overclocking functionality to the mainstream, which is a welcome change from Intel’s $1k+ Extreme Edition chips. The final difference between the 9850 and its predecessors is that AMD runs the northbridge/memory controller on the chip at 2000MHz (200×10) as opposed to the 1800MHz (200×8) found on previous revisions.

Although AMD’s Phenom processors might not be good enough to dethrone equally-clocked parts from Intel, the availability and price of the new chips are two very strong reasons to consider AMD over the sparsely available and price-gouged Core 2 Quad Q9000 series. Perhaps the biggest thing working against AMD is the relatively low clock speed at which its flagship 9850 operates. AMD drew criticism last year when they demonstrated Agena processors operating at 3.0GHz with pretty much zero proof. It would seem that criticism was well placed, as AMD has yet to introduce a production-level Phenom at anywhere near 3.0GHz. The limited overclocking capability of most Phenom chips also raises questions about the plausibility 3.0GHz on current silicon. Many analysts suspect that AMD will hold off the speed bump to 3.0GHz until they release Phenom chips on the 45nm manufacture process later this year.

While the B2 stepping is not technically going away – AMD will supply OEM’s with the remaining chips whilerolling out a few new models to boot – you can expect to see some very low prices on Phenom 9600 Black Edition processors in the coming weeks.

For us the best part of Phenom is that you can put it in a Spider platform, which of course means you can use OverDrive, in every way the best hardware monitoring and controlling software ever made.

Source: AMD Press Release, AnandTech

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