AMD Phenom II Available To Distributors This Week

jdb2 writes "Fudzilla reports that AMD's Phenom II is already available to distributors, and will be available to sell to consumers in the week of the 29th of December. The Phenom II is AMD's consumer version of its 'Shanghai' 45 nanometer SOI process Quad-core Opteron chip and will reportedly ship in 3 and 2.8 gigahertz flavors corresponding to the model numbers '940' and '920' respectively. This first release will be packaged as a Socket AM2+ part which only supports DDR2 memory. The following month AMD is reportedly going to release a new '9x5' series of Socket AM3 versions which support DDR3 memory — these will be backward compatible with Socket AM2+ . This may be an inflection point for AMD if the Shanghai architecture lives up to the performance numbers from preliminary reports and if so it will no doubt also be a welcome belated Christmas present for the already salivating hordes of Tech Junkies."

Comments

It will come down to clock speed.

[LWATCDR]

You can get a good AM2+ motherboard for under $100. DDR2 is cheap, and the price point for these CPUS is looking pretty good.
I doubt that they will beat an I7 but they may offer a great bang for the buck. Even before these came out AMD offered the best value in the good enough category.
You would be hard pressed to find a better value than one of the BE X2s on a 780G motherboard for an average user.

Re:It will come down to clock speed.

[kwabbles]

You can get a good AM2+ motherboard for under $100. DDR2 is cheap, and the price point for these CPUS is looking pretty good.

My primary home machine is an AM2+ Phenom 9950 BE overclocked to 3.0GHz. The Phenoms are easily overclocked using stock cooling - I spent only $900 on this machine including a 9800 GTX GPU, 2GHz 1066mhz RAM, and a WD Raptor HDD - and this box hauls ass. It easily smokes most Intel quad boxes I've seen that cost several hundred more.

I'll always run Intel on servers and what not - but for a workstation/desktop you can't go wrong with AMD. Hell, now that I think about it - I've had more stability problems with Intel than I've had with AMD. I guess it's time to re-think my server platforms.

Re:125 watts!

[Ecuador]

Let me remind you that the Prescott was 103 Watts (@3.2GHz) for *ONE* *SLOW* core.
Any comparison between that Netburst crap and today's processors from both companies is absurd.
That said, Intel is currently ahead in the game in both max performance and TDP, so Phenom is good for existing AM2+ upgrades or for more "budget conscious" scenarios. For the sake of all of us I hope AMD catches up (I am old enough to remember CPU prices from when Intel had no competiti).
In any case you should be more worried about the current graphics cards that tend to require twice the power of the CPU... :)

Re:125 watts!

[florescent_beige]

Always remember AMD measures power consumption differently from Intel, AMD's number is more like a max envelope value while Intel's numbers are a type of average.

These guys found that a 45nm engineering Phenom II drew 24W less than a 9600 under load.

We have both Phenoms and C2Qs at work and I don't notice any difference in the noise. Maybe I would at home where it's quieter.

Re:125 watts!

[Junta]

Though still not perfect, you'd have to compare Intel TDP numbers to AMD 'ACP' numbers. Intel screwed with the point of TDP for marketing purposes and they have the leverage with OEMs to pretty much do as they damn well please, even if it makes OEM life harder.

Secondly, the Core2 isn't comparable in featureset. Notably, it requires a memory controller on motherboard which tends to have a significant amount of power in and of itself. So you'll have to jump to Core i7 parts, which currently advertise a 130W TDP, presumably largely in part due to bringing the controller in.

Thirdly, the current gen phenoms even include 65W parts at reduced clock. I would not doubt that, if not at launch, shortly thereafter lower-wattage parts will come out. Even if not, underclocking may be an option.

All said and done, AMD has something kind of compelling in various ways. I don't think it will take back the performance lead, but Intel is taking some hits in trying to get an equivalent architecture together. Will have to wait for AM3 to have complete apples-to-apples benchmarks for i7 and Phenom II, but I don't think it will be that much closer than it is today.