The Demo: Phenom at 3.0GHz, Today
Clock speeds have been a major blemish for AMD's Barcelona thus far. At Computex, we couldn't even get our hands on a chip that ran faster than 1.6GHz, and AMD just recently announced it would launch in August at 2.0GHz and below. With Intel pushing 3GHz today on 65nm, AMD needs to do more to compete, as it isn't competing against a low IPC chip like the Pentium 4 any longer.
In a demonstration designed to prove that Phenom isn't broken, AMD featured a quad-core Phenom X4 processor, with standard cooling, running at 3.0GHz. While Phenom won't be anywhere near that clock speed when it launches at the end of this year, AMD expects to be at 3GHz within the first half of 2008.
It's a nice demo, at least we know that the architecture isn't broken, but the time frame is still troubling. Luckily for AMD, Penryn will only be available as a high end Extreme part in 2007, buying a little more competitive time.
The 3GHz Phenom had a somewhat talented backup singer: AMD also showcased three Radeon HD 2900 XTs running in CrossFire mode.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
31 Comments
View All Comments
kilkennycat - Friday, July 27, 2007 - link
Highly likely that nVidia will solve this problem at both high and low end with their next family of GPUs. Stay tuned for the end of 2007. The first part out of the chute is also likely not to be the highest end but that which replaces the 8800GTS at a price close to $200 with full HD hardware decode... nVidia is very well aware of the cost-performance hole left by both AMD/ATI and themselves in their current GPU line.strikeback03 - Friday, July 27, 2007 - link
with that Phenom demo box, I think they have finally found use for a 1000W+ power supplySpoelie - Friday, July 27, 2007 - link
Given the size of the heatsink on the cpu, I'd venture power consumption is inline with other engineering samples, 120w or less max TDPSpoelie - Friday, July 27, 2007 - link
Oh my bad, you're right when taking the three 2900XTs in consideration.Where's my edit button :(
Spoelie - Friday, July 27, 2007 - link
At least 2 times in the article, the text builds up anticipation for a graph, but it never comes, the most telling example is on page 6, but one or two pages before it it happened also. Both graphs are supposed to be from Intel.Justin Case - Monday, August 13, 2007 - link
Exactly. They say "Two years ago Intel used the following chart to illustrate the need for multi-core CPUs", and then the image is an AMD slide, not an Intel graph.Omega215D - Thursday, July 26, 2007 - link
If they plan to integrate an on die PCIe controller on the CPU how would this affect overclocking?Regs - Friday, July 27, 2007 - link
I'd imagine just like how it was when AMD intergrated the memory controller, mobo makers will just have to add more bios options.yacoub - Thursday, July 26, 2007 - link
While paging through the article, the thing that stood out most to me was the AMD graphic on page 5 supposedly demonstrating how much more performance Bulldozer is going to offer without a single number on the graph. I guess they want us to measure its performance increases in pixels. hehe :)LTG - Thursday, July 26, 2007 - link
Anand you're really good at distilling out the bottom line from massive amounts of marketing talk and slide ware.