Well, the B3 revision that fixes the well publicized TLB erratum has finally shipped to the consumer reviewers. Techreport’s review was the first that I saw and I just saw Anand’s review. Well, to put it bluntly, in most applications the current 2.5GHz 9850 Phenom is slower than 2.4GHz while in some of the reviews it fares better. Apparently the Techreport managed to get to a stable or at least semi-stable overclock [they didn't do serious stress tests that go for hours], but the benchmarks show some hope. With some tweaking in the voltage, the Phenom hit 3.0GHz which could somehow compete with the QX6800 [2.93GHz 65nm Intel processor]. I am not going to go into a discussion about it’s overclocking power and how it stacks against Q6600 [because Q6600 can go all the way up to 3.2GHz stable at least and not many go for overclocking]. But this at least shows that Phenom can somehow compete with the Core 2 Quad is a good sign.
However, there are some problems that AMD is facing for example :
- Intel enjoys a much higher performance in certain programs. For example, at POV Ray and Photoshop, Intel processors and specially Core 2 Duo have always been exceptionally better [sometimes 2X the performance between similar Intel and AMD offerings]. AMD should try to get the vendor of these programs to optimize the code for them. How difficult will this prove to remains to be seen, but right now, the customers that are to work seriously with these programs, will always prefer Intel processors performance-wise.
- AMD should review some of it’s strategies for the microprocessor, or it will end up in even more problems. For example, AMD didn’t pay much attention to the fabrication technology, resulting in being more than six months behind in the 45nm node and with Intel’s current technology being superior [If we assume that they will bring out Shanghai in 08H2] and if both Intel and AMD-IBM meet the estimates, it will be behind for about 3 months for the 32nm node. AMD probably have been much better off if they hadn’t jumped on the “native quad-core” bandwagon. IMHO, they would have done much better if they had gone to optimize their 65nm K8 design in the short run [how come the maximum clock for 65nm processors is 2.8GHz while it is 3.2GHz for 90nm, this shows they could have put much more effort into the 65nm die shrink] and improve the weak parts of the architecture.
I must add that I, in no way am an Intel fanboy, I’m just trying to be fair here. The Graphics division, ATI, is back on the track nicely and with the 3870/3850 where they hit the sweet-spot for the mainstream performance/price/delivery time and availability. Also AMD seems to be on the track for releasing the 45nm Shanghai processors. Though it might face a very strong opponent which is the Nehalem [I am not sure about how accurate the slides or the ZDNet article is - though both seem to be correct - but if they are indeed correct, Shanghai will be in trouble unless it debuts with high clocks], but even if we take these predictions to be accurate, AMD’s has been performing much better lately than it was earlier [and they did admit that the native quad-core approach was wrong], hopefully they will keep trying to eliminate the bottlenecks in the current design to recover from the current mess they are in, because it is scary to think what will happen if Intel is left without any competition…
Tags: Hardware, Microprocessors
