AMD launch Phenom X4 and 790FX to lukewarm reception

Tuesday 20th November 2007, 09:09:00 PM, written by Rys

AMD finally release the first few quad-core Phenoms a couple of days ago to a more than lukewarm reception, aggressive execution and pricing by Intel taking the wind out of the X4 sails.

The launch was an odd one, AMD gathering hacks together in order to facilitate a better look at Spider, the company's brand new enthusiast platform. Spider seeks to unify the core performance-bringing components in a PC under one company umbrella, and woo folks away from Intel processors, NVIDIA graphics processors and non-AMD core logic.

It doesn't seem to have paid off at this point, with stepping issues, delays of the highest clocked launch part, low clocks in general and some distinctly dodgy mainboards based on the latest AMD northbridge silicon, AMD 790FX.

Architecturally, the new quad-core processor design has a solid match in Intel's current 65nm line of MCM quad-core chips, with the yet-to-be-fleshed-out 45nm designs with ever bigger caches and faster FSBs seemingly ready and waiting.

What's to like? Well, it's still a game of wait and see in some cases, should you buy into the fact that a new stepping of the CPU silicon can solve TLB errata and clock problems, and that mainboards will do their bit without sucking. The shining light of Spider is therefore definitely the GPG's latest silicon, RV670, and the new HD 38xx products that it powers.

We still wait to look at both in any depth, but from reading what's out there already when it comes to the processor, it seems what we'll say at the end of the processor analysis won't be too pretty in a comparative sense.

If you're looking for reviews of the processor elsewhere, the mighty Damage is finally done with his, and Geoff took a look at 790FX a couple of days ago. Both are well worth your technology time. Go read.

Discuss on the forums

Tagging

amd ± phenom, launch, x4, 790fx, lukewarm


Latest Thread Comments (146 total)
Posted by Morgoth the Dark Enemy on Wednesday, 21-Nov-07 08:21:13 UTC
Quoting Silent_Buddha
I'm pretty sure the Anandtech review said they had just received a new bios from MSI for testing and Asus was going to send them an updated one relatively soon for their yet to be released board.

Fromt he sounds of the Anandtech review, it also sounded like quite a bit of instability revolving around the SB600 + 790 combo.

At this point though it's hard to say whether all the problems can be fixed with a new BIOS or if it'll require another revision of the chipset. Kinda reminds me of the old VIA days. Where you always waited for the "a" revision of a chipset for performance and stability. Hopefully that's not the case with 790.

Regards,
SB
I think I'm acquainted with the SB600 issue somewhat, as it's plagued me with the RD600 DFI board I've been using. The fix won't come from AIBs, but from MS...there is a hotfix that adresses the Vista and SB600 in AHCI combination. If any reviewer is reading this, the hotfix is:http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931369. This should allow for AHCI and Vista with SB600(it did for me, fixed a couple of other thingies as well). What worries me a tad is that everyone is pinning the blame on SB600, which I'm not certain is entirely accurate.

Posted by compres Let me join the fun. on Wednesday, 21-Nov-07 14:28:05 UTC
Quoting BRiT
Image: http://forums.wtf.com/images/smilies/popcorn.gif
Can I have some?

Quoting WaltC
Basically, I think that today's reviewers who have concluded that the contest between Phenom and Core 2 is over and done with have failed to apprehend that that particular contest is, in fact, only just beginning. I would have thought that today, on the day of Phenom's launch, that nothing could be more obvious.
The scary part is the IPC(instead of +40% it's -5% C2D).

Quoting Geeforcer
Oh, the memories... (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_n3wvsfq4Y&feature=related)

The last minute and a half = pure gold.. If there is ever an investor lawsuit against AMD, it might crack Top 10 on the plaintiff's evidence list.
Am enjoying the show.

Posted by swaaye on Wednesday, 21-Nov-07 20:23:28 UTC
Quoting compres
The scary part is the IPC(instead of +40% it's -5% C2D).
That -5% is best case too, lol.

Posted by 3dilettante on Wednesday, 21-Nov-07 21:06:55 UTC
The 40% was AMD's PR being very selective about estimated performance on tests they never fully disclosed.
There are a few areas where Barcelona's performance scales well enough that it can boast a higher amount of performance at a given clock speed.

The catch is that it is in a multisocket system on bandwidth-limited FP benchmarks.
There, *Barcelona* fared better versus the Core2 systems at the time of their estimates a half year ago.

Sadly for Phenom, those advantages don't really apply in the single-socket desktop market, and seem to work against it.

Posted by hoho on Thursday, 22-Nov-07 08:55:57 UTC
Quoting 3dilettante
The 40% was AMD's PR being very selective about estimated performance on tests they never fully disclosed.
Well, they did say "in various workloads". I guess their definition of "various" is just a "bit" different than ours :)
Quoting 3dilettante
Sadly for Phenom, those advantages don't really apply in the single-socket desktop market, and seem to work against it.
I wouldn't say they work against it, just that desktop doesn't depend on memory bandwidth and x87 performance all that much.

Posted by Geeforcer on Saturday, 24-Nov-07 08:38:30 UTC
Quoting swaaye
Yikes. *He sure was confident though. Good leader/bullshitter*. Obviously, at that point, it was not even remotely competing with Clovertown so he was just plain lying or going off some magic projections from engineers who wanted to keep their jobs.
You can say that again. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSw2GTLHtQo)

Posted by 3dilettante on Saturday, 24-Nov-07 20:21:43 UTC
Quoting hoho
I wouldn't say they work against it, just that desktop doesn't depend on memory bandwidth and x87 performance all that much.
There is little benefit for the current 3-level cache setup when you don't have to worry about coherency traffic.
The L3 cache, for current steppings, has essentially erased the latency benefit of the IMC.

The A64 has enjoyed a ~20 ns latency advantage over Core2.
The L3 for Phenom right now has an additive latency of ~20 ns.

Posted by Silent_Buddha on Sunday, 25-Nov-07 15:15:56 UTC
It makes one wonder that with AMD's relatively limited available R&D resources (compared to Intel) if they focused almost solely on the server and multi-processor market while hoping that any breakthroughs in that area would filter down to the desktop market.

As it certainly appears to be the case at first glance. All these changes should keep AMD ahead in the 4+ processor server market, however it doesn't appear to be doing much for the single processor desktop market.

Regards,
SB

Posted by AlStrong on Sunday, 25-Nov-07 22:41:14 UTC
How feasible would it be for them to remove the L3 and unify the L2? I suppose that would be a major re-working of the layout. :???:

Posted by ShaidarHaran on Monday, 26-Nov-07 01:56:38 UTC
Quoting AlStrong
How feasible would it be for them to remove the L3 and unify the L2? I suppose that would be a major re-working of the layout. :???:
I wish they would release such a part, but doubt we'll ever see a unified L2 part from AMD (not this generation anyway). Ditching the L3 probably will happen for low-end parts though. Obviously the L3 is detrimental to performance outside of server/HPC workloads so the scenario you described would likely bring Phenom back to near-parity with Intel's Quads, IPC-wise anyway.


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