AMD Phenom X3 released; reviewed

Thursday 24th April 2008, 04:00:00 PM, written by Arun

AMD has finally released the Phenom X3 outside of the OEM market, with reviews already available at all major hardware websites, including The Tech Report. But is it good?

Clearly Scott Wasson at TR doesn't think too highly of the X3; it's worth reading the full review to find out why exactly, but basically single-threaded performance is subpar and in multi-threaded workloads it's hardly unequivocally superior to Intel's 45nm dual-core CPUs. The relative price difference with AMD's quad-core processors is also rather small, and power efficiency isn't very impressive (although TDP and measured load power are both nicely down compared to the X4; the 2.4GHz is available at 95W rather than 125W, for example). It's not really bad overall, but it certainly isn't particularly good either.

This is about what we expected when we examined AMD and Intel's relative positioning for the Back-to-School and Winter 2008 OEM cycles. So once again, it seems unlikely that they could deliver a break-even quarter in Q3 2008; Q4, however, is much more likely if the 45nm CPUs are out there on time. We'll see what happens in the coming months either way.

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amd ± phenom, x3

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