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AMD Phenom II Available To Distributors This Week

Posted by timothy on from the making-my-computers-feel-even-slower dept.

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."

26 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. First Post by fotoguzzi · · Score: 2, Funny

    Using new AMD processor.

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    Their they're doing there hair.
  2. It will come down to clock speed. by LWATCDR · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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    1. Re:It will come down to clock speed. by kwabbles · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
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    2. Re:It will come down to clock speed. by metallurge · · Score: 2, Informative

      These are pretty good choices, with solid capacitors in the power supply section. 128M sideport memory is optional.

      Bottom line, you want a 790GX northbridge and a 750 southbridge.

      Or, to get significantly cheaper and still really quite decent, you can go with one of these. 780GX northbridge, 700 southbridge. Way south of $100.

    3. Re:It will come down to clock speed. by Junta · · Score: 2, Informative

      Don't know about affordably getting to 16GB in a single socket board. Most boards in that space have 4 dimm slots and 4 GB dimms are relatively expensive. I don't know about the shuttle cases, I don't require that small a packaging and I have historically found larger cases more convenient for maintenance and thermal management (and expense of repairs, blowing a power supply in a weird form factor sucks). If you get AMD graphics, you may have some 3D capability in BSD (nVidia too maybem but options are more open ended in AMD currently). That said, onboard ATI graphics should be more than enough for light 3d stuff.

      I'm personally waiting for Phenom II DDR3 parts to come and evaluating a purchase. I'm dubious of the cost of DDR3, but wanting to see what the market does as Core i7 and AMD both ramp up to using it commonly.

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    4. Re:It will come down to clock speed. by Daengbo · · Score: 2, Informative
      OK, but the AC above (you?) was complaining that (s)he couldn't find an MB for less than a hundred dollars. The linked one fits.

      Why pay for complete trash you're going to disable when you can have MUCH nicer for the same price ....

      Because the AC wanted proof that there was a motherboard available for under a hundred dollars to build the machine he was talking about. If you want a discreet graphic card, nothing is stopping you from using one.

      AMD motherboards have always been more expensive than Intel ones. Sometimes the CPU+MB price comes out less, some years it doesn't.

      Yeah, I read the linked post. You're still just wrong and argumentative. Some might even suggest trolling.

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    5. Re:It will come down to clock speed. by Daengbo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You were clear, just not lucid. On-board video doesn't make a difference if you're not going to use it. Other people have told you the same.

      You don't have to use the RAID on your board either. It sucks, too. Would you refuse to buy a board simply because it had the option of using RAID? Do you want an MB with just the number of PCI or RAM slots you plan to use, too? What if it has PS2 and a serial port you don't want?

      You're just being argumentative. Get a life.

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    6. Re:It will come down to clock speed. by metallurge · · Score: 2, Informative

      So, the problem for you comes down to space on the ATX I/O shield? Well, if that's your biggest gripe, yeah, sure, onboard video takes up a lot of backplate real estate. But it seems rather a silly complaint to me. I figure someone like you would already have a drive bay faceplate with all the desired connections. They are more convenient there than on the back of the computer anyway. As far as "getting what you pay for", basically AMD has priced their chipsets to where the onboard video is essentially free at retail. So it doesn't really cost you extra. That's why there are so few non-integrated options out there. There is no economic reason to build them.

    7. Re:It will come down to clock speed. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "It easily smokes most Intel quad boxes I've seen that cost several hundred more."

      Except, it doesn't smoke any Intel Quad, at all. That CPU is about the same speed as the *2 year old* Q6600 at stock speed (couple hundred extra MHz but less cache). Both overclock VERY similarly too. Almost no differences in benches all-around. Unless you were comparing your OC'ed CPU to a stock Intel, which is just as true as saying a Q6600 (once OC'ed) smokes every Phenom out there at any price point (at stock speed). In fact, it's more like your box gets smoked by an Intel that costs one hundred more...

      The only real difference here, is that your new CPU uses significantly more power. The $20 you saved, you'll pay 10x back in extra power used.

      It's kinda sad to see AMD's latest best offering that's 2 months old barely managing to compete with a 2 year old chip...

      "I'll always run Intel on servers and what not - but for a workstation/desktop you can't go wrong with AMD."

      Actually, it's EXACTLY the inverse! Opterons have always been much nicer: HT bus, NUMA architecture and everything else, up until now, with Intel's QPI bus. The funny thing is, now that it's going to start not sucking (Xeons), you're switching away from it? And on the desktop, Core 2 is just much better. You got it all COMPLETELY backwards!

    8. Re:It will come down to clock speed. by afidel · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I run AMD on my highest demand boxes because the Hypertransport bus kicks the everloving crap out of a slow FSB for memory sharing between processors. I'm in good company, the NYSE runs much of their infrastructure on HP DL585's running linux. For high throughput processing on commodity hardware it's hard to beat. Intel might catch up around 2H'09 when they bring out the multiprocessor version of the i7.

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  3. 125 watts! by mikedep333 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    According to wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_future_AMD_Phenom_microprocessors It uses 125 Watts of power! The hot & noisy prescott was around 100 watts. I think I'll go with a nice 95 watt core 2 quad, or the upcoming c2q model at 65 watts.

    1. Re:125 watts! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      TDP != power usage. it might draw that (or more even), but its not necessarily drawing that on average.

      It's the max expected under normal conditions for thermal dissipation.

    2. Re:125 watts! by Ecuador · · Score: 4, Informative

      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... :)

      --
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    3. Re:125 watts! by florescent_beige · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

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    4. Re:125 watts! by Chandon+Seldon · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I think I'll go with a nice 95 watt core 2 quad, or the upcoming c2q model at 65 watts.

      How much power does the off-chip memory controller draw on that 95-watt core 2 quad?

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    5. Re:125 watts! by Junta · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

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    6. Re:125 watts! by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2

      Considering that the BeagleBoard is fast enough for a lot of casual users and draws 1.8W for the entire system, I really do wonder what the other 100W or so gets you. If I want speed at any cost, POWER6 is more attractive. If I want good performance-per-Watt, the Cortex A8 line is more attractive. Unless you want to run Windows, there doesn't seem to be much attraction in x86 chips anymore.

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  4. Re:the opterons were already available by metallurge · · Score: 3, Funny

    Higher price... Incompatible socket... Lower frequency...
    What's not to like?

  5. Concur.. by Junta · · Score: 4, Interesting

    In fact, we deal with both AMD and Intel servers, and under benchmarking conditions, we allegedly make the Intel parts exceed TDP.

    The problem is that TDP became a marketing point and thus Intel abandoned the original intent. It was supposed to allow systems vendors to plan how many CFM and how good a heat sink would be needed to dissipate all the heat in a worst case scenario. To AMD's credit, they have a metric they call 'ACP' to indicate their analogous figure to Intel's TDP. I like that better in theory than just abandoning TDP.

    That said, for Intel and AMD, I wonder what they consider 'typical' loads. In the end, a breakdown of what clock speeds and what percentage of time is in C1 and such would be appreciated to know what to expect. Knowing what the CPU uses at each clock, with about 0% of time in sleep states and near 100% would let me compare a bit better than a single oversimplified number.

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  6. Inflection? by florescent_beige · · Score: 3, Funny

    This may be an inflection point for AMD...

    An inflection is where the 2nd derivative of a function changes sign ie the curvature is zero.

    I think the summary meant minima, that's where the first derivative is zero if the curve is smooth. That would mean it changes from going down to going up.

    Unless we are talking about AMD's rate of change of growth which could go from shrinking faster and faster to shrinking slower and slower at an inflection. I guess that could be seen as a good thing these days for them.

    Slow day I'll go away now.

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    Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
    1. Re:Inflection? by jdb2 · · Score: 2, Informative

      This may be an inflection point for AMD...

      An inflection is where the 2nd derivative of a function changes sign ie the curvature is zero.

      I think the summary meant minima, that's where the first derivative is zero if the curve is smooth. That would mean it changes from going down to going up.

      Err, no shit sherlock. :) You probably mean no offense, but I've been studying advanced mathematics ( at the graduate/doctoral level now ) for over a decade.

      Anyway, I meant inflection point.

      If you take AMD's health as a function of time , say , h(t), then for the past year or more the derivative has been negative, and growing more negative. If the Phenom II launch is indeed the catalyst for an AMD "turn around", then naturally the derivative h'(t) will reverse sign and begin to increase. This represents AMD's "putting their gears into reverse" and "stepping on the gas" -- they have to dissipate their accumulated downward momentum in order to eventually gain positive, increasing momentum.

      jdb2

    2. Re:Inflection? by afaiktoit · · Score: 2, Funny

      I feel like I've stepped into an XKCD comic.

  7. Re:FAR better option than anything AMD has to offe by lysergic.acid · · Score: 2, Insightful

    um, if you don't want integrated graphics, you can just get the 790X--it's cheaper.

    you might want to get a clue first before ranting off incoherently.

  8. Wait for 95Watt AM# by kolbe · · Score: 5, Interesting

    AMD is standing behind and embracing the AM3 socket, the main feature of which is the addition DDR 3 memory support.

    It should be noted that AMD has previously stated that while Socket AM3 processors will work in Socket AM2/AM2+ motherboards, not all AM2/AM2+ processors will be supported by AM3 motherboards. By this time the price of DDR3 RAM might have fallen to a point where itâ(TM)s affordable.

    With Intel changing sockets like its going out of style, AMD has done an excellent job making their products extremely compatible between generations. As such, it's kept many "budget" PC builders somewhat loyal, including myself.

    If you buy one of the current AM2+ socketed Phenom II CPU's, you have a very good chance that you will be able to throw it in a new AM3 socket motherboard when they come out before March'09.

    None the less, I'm a fickle fool and will wait until AM3 is out... what's 2 more months anyway?

  9. What are ye, nuts?! by Gazzonyx · · Score: 2, Interesting

    NOOO! Anything but Biostar! Seriously.

    If you get one that makes it to the end of the 90 warranty period, count yourself lucky!

    This summer I needed a socket 478 (don't ask... broke college student) mobo, so I went down to the computer shop down town. I told the guy I needed a motherboard, any motherboard, cheap and before the end of the day. The guy says, "Well, we've got a few biostar for $50". There was a very awkward silence for about 10 seconds and I finally said, "Ummmm... got anything else?"
    "For $90 we've got one MSI left."
    "Sold."
    "Good choice; those biostar boards always come back to us." (or something to that effect)

    --

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  10. Re:FAR better option than anything AMD has to offe by metallurge · · Score: 2, Informative

    Old Biostar boards were junk. This generation looks much better engineered. But hey, if you don't like the Biostar 790xx, get whatever vendor you like in a 780xx. It still meets your originally-stated requirements. And, as a matter of fact, yes, I have breadboarded machines from scratch. Mine weren't for a grade. You? As to my support for AMD, it is a mix of reasons. Yes, some of it is supporting the underdog. But some of it is, as the underdog, AMD has to offer better value in order to compete against chipzilla. And with the Phenom II, they are moving up into the midrange desktop market again.