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AMD Launches Fastest Phenom Yet, Phenom II X4 980
MojoKid writes "Although much of the buzz lately has revolved around AMD's upcoming Llano and Bulldozer-based APUs, AMD isn't done pushing the envelope with their existing processor designs. Over the last few months AMD has continued to ramp up frequencies on their current bread-and-butter Phenom II processor line-up to the point where they're now flirting with the 4GHz mark. The Phenom II X4 980 Black Edition marks the release of AMD's highest clocked processor yet. The new quad-core Phenom II X4 980 Black Edition's default clock on all four of its cores is 3.7GHz. Like previous Deneb-based Phenom II processors, the X4 980 BE sports a total of 512K of L1 cache with 2MB of L2 cache, and 6MB of shared L3 cache. Performance-wise, for under $200, the processor holds up pretty well versus others in its class and it's an easy upgrade for AM2+ and AM3 socket systems."
I just bought a 6-core AMD chip a week ago. Where is the x6 version of this baby?
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
I'll be waiting for the dust to clear with Bulldozer before I make a commitment for my next build. No reason to buy a $200 Phenom II X4 980 now when there is no application that needs that much power. If you buy a Sandy Bridge or a higher-end AM3 board/processor now, your average gamer or office worker won't be able to max it out for years -- unless he does video editing or extensive photo shop or if he has to get his DVD rips down to a 10 minute rip vs a 15 minute rip per feature film...
Might as well wait for the dust to clear or for prices to fall.
This [arstechnica.com] thread has some interesting information on possible BD performance.
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This is 301 posts with back and forth that looks basically to be speculation. Prove me wrong by quoting specific statements of those that have benched the [unreleased] bulldozer. Because otherwise, this link is basically a bunch of AMD fanboys fighting against Intel fanboys. But prove me wrong...
Once the GPU is maxed-out, there's nothing more for the CPU to do. If you're running at 30 FPS at high-res, the CPU might be at 30%. At that point, any number of different CPUs will have identical benchmark results. When you drop the load off the GPU, the CPU hits 100% usage and you can compare 150 fps to 160 fps, for example. This is a very simple and typical way to benchmark CPUs for gaming perf. Reviews and reviewers (such as myself) have been doing this for 10+ years, since the very first 3D accelerators came to the gaming market.
That seems like a stupid way to benchmark. It encourages people to be misinformed by thinking that they can get better frame rates by buying a faster CPU even though under real world conditions the game will be GPU bound and the CPU is irrelevant. Why not stick to benchmarking using applications that are actually CPU bound under normal usage?
So clock speed means everything when comparing different CPUs and not their raw performance. Got it.
Furthermore, there is no 10 year old CPU that runs at 3ghz unless you did some absurd overclocking.
Ummm, against what, my obsolete Phenom (I) X4 9850? Funny how true fanbois can read the same review as an objective person and walk away with entirely different conclusions, eh?
The AnandTech review was even less forgiving of AMD's underdog status, and basically recommended passing and either waiting for the allegedly awesome new Bulldog line or jumping ship for Intel. Hell, when Sandy Bridge both outperforms AND underconsumes (power), you oughtta be seriously questioning that underdog affection. I certainly am.
Read this excerpt from an AMD management blog:
"Thanks to Damon at AMD for this link to a blog from AMD's Godfrey Cheng.
We are no longer chasing the Phantom x86 Bottleneck. Our goal is to provide good headroom for video and graphics workloads, and to this effect “Llano” is designed to be successful. To be clear, AMD continues to invest in x86 performance. With our “Bulldozer” core and in future Bulldozer-based products, we are designing for faster and more efficient x86 performance; however, AMD is seeking to deliver a balance of graphics, video, compute and x86 capabilities and we are confident our APUs provide the best recipe for the great majority of consumers. "
People, read between the lines.
What he is saying is that they can no longer compete with Intel on speed and have decided to concentrate on a balance at the low end priced points.
The days of the cpu wars are in fact over and Intel has won with Sandy Bridge.
Yes, I have been an AMD only fan for years but you have to face the reality that times have changed permanently in Intels favor and AMD's days are numbered.
Why else do you think Bulldozer is over a year late!
Oh, and AMD is prime for a buyout right now and there are rumors.
When AMD fails Intel will have a monopoly and the consumer will loose in the end.
Sad but true.
Not stupid at all. It shows that if your video is not a factor or you upgrade to an adequate video card when one is available,the better cpu to buy is X.
This is common practice that has been used for at least a decade now.
furthermore - its a SYNTHETIC BENCHMARK. no one wants to play crysis at 800x600, but its a tool we can use to measure cpu performance. no one wants to buy a PC soley to sit and calculate prime numbers all day either, but stressprime and other stuff is used for benchmarking also.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Moores observation was about transistor count, not mHz, corecount, speed, wattage, flops, bogomips, or anything else.
I won't talk about Intel's system, but AMD is actually relatively straightforward:
First comes the family name. For desktops, this is usually either "Athlon II" or "Phenom II". The only real difference between them is the amount of cache.
Then comes the core count - X2, X3, X4 or X6. Completely self-explanatory.
This is followed by a number that essentially stands in for the clock speed. Higher-clocked processors have higher numbers, lower-clocked processors have lower numbers.
Finally, certain processors have "Black Edition" appended, which simply means that the multiplier is unlocked, greatly easing overclocking.
Not exactly, but close for single-core performance. The "MHz Myth" is largely a myth itself. As this table shows, per-MHz single-core performance between the infamously bad (even at the time) P4 and the current best (Core i7) has only improved by a factor of less than 2.6, since October 2004! (When the Pentium 3.6 EE was released).
Perhaps more importantly, the ratio between the most productive (per-mhz) chip from 2004 (Athlon64 2.6) and the most productive on the chart now is a mere 1.6! That's a 60% improvement in almost 7 years!
That is a joke. For reference, we went from the Pentium 100 (March 1994) to the Pentium 200 (June 1996) - approximately a 100% improvement in a little over 2 years.
So, no, improvements in instructions per cycle are not even close to keeping pace with what improvements in MHz used to give us. (And if you looked at instructions per cycle per transistor, it would be abysmal - which is another way of saying Moore's law is hardly helping single-threaded performance any more).
I'm sure you didn't mean it quite this way, but a 60% improvement in the amount of work done per clock cycle is some pretty impressive engineering...
Visit the
Well yes, if such GPUs were available today, sure. They're not. However the gaming benchmark is not useless, because its a real-world mix of code in a typical app the CPU might be used to run. You're looking at the benchmarks expecting them to be some absolute result. They're not. You have to use your head and interpret the results, as with any experiement. A benchmark isn't a "you need to buy this cpu for this game" statement. Its a performance indication on a particular code path.
Synthetic benchmarks might give you a number to compare CPUs with, but if they're not doing real world tasks (or even better, the exact tasks you intend to use the box for, such as running a game if you're a gamer) they are easily cheated on - the cpu vendor can simply spend transistors on optimizing for the instructions most commonly used on the benchmark.
In summary: without thoughtful analysis, all benchmark results are useless. Also, no one benchmark should be taken as "authoritative". Compare multiple benchmarks, pay special attention to those that run similar code/apps was you will be running, and make your choice that way.
Don't rely on a single number to do it for you.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Well, that's the problem... since hitting the MHz wall, it's taking more and more heroic efforts to achieve any speedup in single-core performance. (In fact if I'm not mistaken, the most-productive-per-cycle core on that chart is a couple years old.) But I agree, it's not that engineers are getting dumber or anything like that. It's getting harder, and progress has become slow.
Don't forget that IPC isn't the be all and end all. If you're stalled due to cache misses, then IPC goes out the Window. Modern CPUs have much more cache and much faster buses to main memory than we had in 2004. That is a large reason as to why they're faster. They also have additional instructions that can do more work per instruction - so comparing IPC from CPUs released today to CPUs released last decade is even more meaningless.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I worry about it a little bit, but as long as they are price/performance equivalent to the Intel CPUs in the low-mid range, I don't think there's a huge issue. (Assuming that they keep making a profit.)
Very few people buy CPUs over $200-$300.
(I stick with AMD for a few reasons. There's never any guesses about whether an Opteron will support hardware virtualization or whether it will be disabled by the chipset/BIOS. Their product lineup is straight forward compared to Intel, and their sockets make sense. And mostly because they came out with *inexpensive* dual-core CPUs for under $200 back when Intel was still charging $300-$400.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
You could find a wider variety of benchmarks with results reported on a wide range of new and old CPUs if you took points/core/MHz.
I believe the stand-in numbers were originally used to compensate for differences in efficiency. If a chip was clocked slower but more efficient, such that it was essentially on the same level as its competitors, they made up these numbers so that they didn't have to put a lower clock rate than everyone else on the box. Take for example the Athlon 2800s from back in 2003, which ran at about 2 GHz but were supposedly comparable to the 2.8 GHz Pentium chips.
I think it basically just got out of hand and now nobody uses the actual clock rate any more and the numbers don't mean anything.
For about two years (2004 to 2006), AMD's Athlon 64 clearly beat the aging Pentium4. Especially after the dual-core Athlon 64 X2 was introduced in 2005.
Intel took the lead again with the Core2Duo in 2006, albeit at much higher prices than AMD. Since that time, Intel has usually offered the fastest processors at the high end, while AMD usually offers better performance per dollars in the budget range. Recently, the introduction of Sandy Bridge has put more pressure on AMD, but a new AMD processor generation is approaching release. Lets compare that to Sandy Bridge in another two months.
Finally (and that's why I buy AMD), AMD offers ECC Ram with all except the cheapest CPUs. Intel supports that only in the Xeons for the server market, and those are really expensive.
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