THG Labs In Depth With AMD Spider

The Last Gunslinger writes "Tom's Hardware Guide has published detailed results of their laboratory analysis of AMD's recently released Spider platform, including the Phenom 9500 and 9600 running on 790FX chipsets. Amongst other interesting details, the 2.4GHz Phenom 9700 has been pushed back to Q1 2008. The 2.3GHz Phenom 9600 benchmarks on average 13.5% lower than Intel's Q6600 quad-core CPU...and the MSRP for the Phenom is about 13.6% less as well. Much is made of the AMD OverDrive utility, by which the THG labs were able to OC the Spider platform by 25% (3.0GHz) using air cooling alone."

Comments

Four graphics cards!

[morgan_greywolf]

With the new 7-series chipset family, consisting of the 790FX, 790X and 770, AMD is simultaneously unveiling the Spider platform. Up to four graphics cards can be set up as a Crossfire X configuration using the new 790FX chipset. Four graphics cards! Now that sounds like a gamer's wet dream. These days, CPU performance is not nearly as important as GPU performance. Four GPUs, running in parallel, with the right level of support in DirectX and OpenGL and you can just imagine those FPS! That's the real news of interest in this article, IMHO.

AMD underwhelms us, again.

[Peter Cooper]

Much is made of the AMD OverDrive utility, by which the THG labs were able to OC the Spider platform by 25% (3.0GHz) using air cooling alone.

And almost everyone with a Q6600 can get it up to 3GHz on air too, even on the stock heatsink. With something a little more special, like a Thermalight air cooler, speeds of 3.4->3.6GHz are not uncommon. If we look at the benchmarks in the TomsHardware article, the Phenom gets its ass kicked nearly everywhere across the board. It can be argued that this is because most apps are not optimized to work on quad-core chips yet, but even in the benchmarks where quad-core is clearly a benefit, Intel still edges out a respectable lead with their reasonably older technology.

The advantages of the Spider platform are that you won't need to buy a new board for future processors

We've heard that before! Okay, AMD has done something pretty clever with making the chips compatible across the board.. but I'm willing to wager that the percentage of PC owners who actually upgrade their machines year by year is reasonably low. There are a lot of enthusiasts who do it, and this is likely AMD's market if their performance wasn't so poor compared to Intel nowadays, but computer parts are cheap enough to get a new machine every couple of years instead. Certainly this won't be of any interest to the main manufacturers.

Still, I'm glad AMD's there. Their presence is helping to keep Intel honest and the prices generally low, but as an ex-AMD diehard, I'm not seeing any reason to go back to them yet.

Re:AMD underwhelms us, again.

[turgid]

I've always enjoyed AMD's products... I don't know if it's some force from above, but whenever I deal with any Intel system, it "feels" slower. I'm not saying that it is, just doesn't feel as snappy.

That's because intel's front side bus architecture, off chip memory controller and inefficient caches hinder performance, especially under heavy multitasking. You'll also note that multiprocessor (i.e. multicore) intel systems scale very poorly as the number of cores (or processors) goes up compared with AMD processors which have a more sophisticated design.

As code becomes more parallel as a matter of course, we'll see these effects becoming more important. Next year, intel is bringing out a more AMD-like NUMA architecture (new processors, chipsets and motherboards) to try to address these issues. AMD has a 5 year headstart.

Re:42 Pages...

[Hemogoblin]

... and their conclusion:

In the end, if you're looking to make the most of a long-term investment, AMD is without a doubt the better platform choice.