AMD are the underdog, they have been the underdog and for the foreseeable future they will continue to be the underdog. They have just recorded their ...
AMD are the underdog, they have been the underdog and for the foreseeable future they will continue to be the underdog. They have just recorded their fifth quarter financial loss and seem to be floundering lately.
The most recent pitfall that AMD has suffered came in the form of the infamous TLB errata which saw instability at high load levels, this was almost corrected using motherboard BIOS updates but this ‘quick fix’ resulted in a 10% performance decrease. AMD gave the user the option to either enable the fix in the BIOS and gain stability but lose performance, or keep the performance but lose stability. Thankfully the TLB error was limited to the B2 stepping of the Phenom range, AMD solved this problem and introduced it in the 83 stepping revision of the Phenom. All Phenom chips based on the new 63 stepping have a 50 at the end of their nomenclature, such as the Phenom X4 9850. The new numbers allow you to make sure you are getting the new revision chip and not one of the old bugged chips.
The AMD Phenom is the latest chip series to come from the underdog chip giant. Touted as being the only true quad core on the desktop market, the Phenom series of chips is therefore something of a life raft for AMD, who are literally drowning under the sheer massive market share that Intel has managed to take back over the last 3 years. The Phenom range did stumble a bit in the beginning with the infamous TLB errata, but they have come out with guns reloaded and ready to blaze.
The AMD Phenom range is based on AMD's 65nm architecture, many would criticize that this is already a generation behind Intel's 45nm architecture, but this hasn't stopped AMD from forging ahead and developing the Phenom range. The AMD Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition is an impressive chip (for AMD standards); with a clock speed of 2.5GHz, 512KB L2 Cache and 2MB L3 Cache. It's based on a 65nm AM2+ design, and it's a 63 revision chip. The design is based on the revised 65nm manufacturing process employing the already stated 83 revision. To test this chip to its limits we used the ever popular MSI KgA2 Platinum vl.O (BIOS vl.4). This board is based on the AMD 790FX (ATI RD790) chipset and let us just say that we were really impressed with the specs of the board in relation to its price.
We got our friends to organize us some OCZ Reaper HPC DDR2 1066 memory, and MSI again pulled through with a MSI 3870X2 to round off this lovely package. So we had a rig to take this chip to the sky and back, so we lit the fuse and watched this bad boy soar.
From the results at stock clock speeds the Phenom is on a par to the Intel Q6600, and with the Q6600 being a few hundred bucks cheaper it becomes hard to argue for the 9850. Now in the past the Athlon 64 was the overclocking king, but then after Intel realized the Netburst failure and released the Core architecture, and chips such as the Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 soon were taking the crown, chips that were cheap, powerful and able to reach speeds far higher than the stock clock speeds. Intel is ruling the overclocking roost, period.
So can AMD actually perform against this giant, a short answer is no. Since the AMD Phenom X4 9850 is AMD's top desktop processor it should actually be aimed at Intel's top chips, but sadly it doesn't. The 9850 fails on so many levels it's hard to turn a blind eye. While a 500MHz overclock from 2.5GHz up to 3GHz can give a pretty impressive performance increase it fails to compare to the overclocking ability of Intel's 65nm and 45nm chips. We tried to push it beyond 3GHz and managed 3/lGHz but we only managed to get a single Super Pi 1M run before we had blue screens, the Super Pi score we got was 26.89s. Unfortunately even after pushing the voltage up to over 1.5v we still couldn't get the chip to be stabile enough for a 3D Mark run.
The Phenom X4 9850 has only 4Mb L.3 cache compare to the 6Mb that accompanies the new Intel Penryn. The only aspect that keeps AMD ahead of Intel is their on-die memory controller which used to be AMDs defining feature, but Intel are going to be introducing their own on-die memory controller with the new Nehalem chip.
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