The PC is no longer about a CPU or GPU in isolation, it’s about “platforms,” says AMD. And the company’s Spider platform gives us a glimpse of what that means. Spider is based on the new 790FX chipset, which will support up to four Radeon HD 3870 cards in CrossFire and the quad-core Phenom—all for a pretty low price. AMD predicts that you’ll be able to build a quad-GPU machine with a quad-core Phenom for less than $2,000. If you went for Intel’s Extreme CPU, you’d spend $1,000 for the CPU and another $500 for the DDR3, leaving you just $500 for the rest of the components.
AMD says Spider is just a preview though. Ultimately, the company plans to have graphics cores integrated with x86 cores, making the platformization of the PC a foregone conclusion. Don’t believe it? Intel, which currently has x86 CPUs and chipsets, is heavily investing in graphics as well, and has also said it will eventually offer a product with a graphics core integrated into the CPU.
What’s not clear is how this will affect the salad bar formula we currently use for building a PC. Will platforms that have you order meal A or meal B replace our pick-and-choose world? Stay tuned.
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| AMD's AM2 socket |
While AMD hit a rough patch with the short-lived Socket 940 and Socket 754 platforms, lately it’s been solid when it comes to providing an upgrade path. If you had a Socket 939 board, you could easily go from a low-end CPU to a spendy single core. And when dual cores came out, you could just drop one of those suckers in the very same board and it worked too. The same goes for AMD’s Socket AM2/AM2+ design. If you’ve been living with an older 90nm Athlon 64 X2 5000+ for two years, you should be able to update the BIOS and drop in a Phenom to get quad-core performance.
That’s not guaranteed, of course. The company says board design issues, and even the size of the flash memory used to store the BIOS image, could have an impact on Phenom support. How do you know if your AM2 board will run the new CPU? Obviously, boards using AMD’s new 790FX chipset will work, but there are two other ways to verify compatibility: Cruise AMD’s website, http://tinyurl.com/yrmmy4, to see if the company has approved your board for Phenom yet. Or visit your motherboard manufacturer’s website and check its CPU-compatibility list before you make a purchase.
AMD has learned from its prior mistakes. Many Socket 939 users felt burned when the company made a quick transition to AM2 and turned the fab taps off on S939 CPUs. When AMD moves to DDR3 in 2009, it expects to have backward compatibility with AM2 and AM3 boards with its DDR3 CPUs. Overall, AMD gets a good grade for compatibility even if performance is a disappointment.
Okay. Enough about the CPU. Let's see what the benchmarks tell.
For our comparison, AMD provided an unlocked engineering-sample Phenom that we ran at 2.6GHz and 2.3GHz in Asus’s new 790FX-based M3A32-MVP Deluxe board. We compared AMD’s CPU to the original Intel 2.66GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6700 CPU that we received more than a year ago from Intel. While it carries the Extreme tag, the QX6700 is identical to the Core 2 Quad Q6700 except that it’s unlocked. That let us run the chip at both 2.66GHz and 2.4GHz to simulate the performance of a Core 2 Quad Q6600. The board used for the Core 2 chip was EVGA’s 680i SLI. Both machines featured DDR2 RAM clocked at 1,066MHz. Memory timing was manually set on both platforms and both used 150GB Western Digital Raptor hard drives and identically clocked GeForce 8800 GTX cards, as well as the same drivers. Once we were finished with the Phenom testing, we dropped in an Athlon 64 X2 6400+ for comparison. As we pointed out in the main story, we could not determine if the performance-crippling TLB patch was present in the Asus M3A32-MVP board we used, but we suspect it was not, so our performance for the 2.3GHz runs would be higher than that of a system with the patch applied. For our test, we did not trot out Intel’s 45nm 3GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9650 or the company’s new 3.2GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9770. We didn’t even pull out Intel’s older 3GHz quad-core— after the 2.66GHz Core 2 Quad beat up the Phenom, we decided to be merciful. And there was definitely no need to throw in 1,600MHz FSB chips or DDR3/1600. When one team is getting pummeled, you don’t grind it further into the ground. You let it slink off the field with a modicum of pride intact.
After all the trash talking, all the “true quad core” pimping, the result is a chip that’s slower than Intel’s cheapest quad core. And more expensive to boot!
The sad part is that while Phenom will be viewed as a big yawner, it’s not really a bad CPU. In fact, it’s a respectable chip for encoding and most applications. And it’s certainly damned faster than any Athlon 64.
But in the final tally, if you are into performance—and most enthusiasts are—Intel is the only game in town this season. There’s simply no comparison. On the other hand, if you’re vested in AMD and own a Socket AM2 board, it’s probably worth considering a Phenom, as it gets you two more cores, bags more performance, and little more hassle than a BIOS update and a little thermal paste on your hand.
The more troubling issue is the cost to AMD’s credibility. With its CPUs so far in the hole, does it have the resources and capability to make a comeback?
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| (click to see full-sized benchmark chart) |
Comments are closed on this article
Kromaethius
February 10, 2008 at 9:48pm
Just built one and it's noticeably slower in all my tests against my Intel beastie. Yup, I'll stick with Intel's "True Power" vs AMD's "True 4 Core" any day.
dc10ten
February 19, 2008 at 12:12am
You may stick with "True Power" but intel is banking on "true 4 Core" Hence the reason they are moving it all on one die with Nehalm. Plus they are implementing a memory controller on the CPU. I wonder what other ideas intel has used from AMD...
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