AMD's Phenom Unveiled: A Somber Farewell to K8
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 19, 2007 1:25 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Media Encoding Performance
We'll start with our DivX test; this is the same benchmark we've been running for years, we've simply updated to DivX 6.7. The codec was set to Unconstrained quality, with the quality/performance slider at 5 and enhanced multi-threading enabled. The rest of the codec settings remained at their defaults.
Despite the move to four cores and the improvements to the K8 architecture, the Phenom, even at 2.4GHz, is slower than the Core 2 Quad Q6600. Clock for clock, Intel has a 24% performance advantage here.
AMD did make some progress however, if we look back at some of our older numbers the gap at 3.0GHz between dual-core chips was almost 38%.
The situation gets even more bleak once you take into account that the Phenom 9700 will most likely ship when Intel's Q9450 is also available which extends Intel's lead to over 30%.
AMD has always been much more competitive at encoding using Microsoft's Windows Media Video codec:
Windows Media Encoder performance is virtually identical between the Phenom and Core 2 Quad at the same clock speed. However, once you take price into account, Intel starts to pull ahead; the Q6600 is priced competitively with the Phenom 9600 and manages a 7% performance advantage over the 9600. It's not much, but the Q6600 is also cheaper.
Our final encoding test is an increasingly popular format: x264. We encode the same .avi file from our WME test but this time using the x264 codec and AutoMKV. We didn't encode audio and left all program settings at its defaults, the only thing we changed was we asked that the final file size be 100MB (down from 500MB).
Much like our WME results, clock for clock AMD's Phenom actually equals the performance of the Core 2 Quad. Take price into account and Intel is still the right buy; it's tough to say what will happen when the Phenom 9700 and 9900 eventually launch because they may be competing against Penryn at that time, which in this case would be the Q9450, a more formidable opponent.
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Regs - Monday, November 19, 2007 - link
Why wait? Why on earth would you want to wait? Read Anand's rant, which I agree completely with. AMD has become it's own worst competitor. It's bending to pressure and they're steering away from their own customers and focusing in how to "compromise" their competitor.They didn't even know what they were going to launch until the last minute. So why on earth would you want to wait for more broken promises and disappointment? Maybe we should all take a trip to Tahoe. And while we're there, we can take every upper level manager out for a evening of electro-shock therapy.
How can such a customer-centric company, after making a block buster product called the K8, collapse so quickly from pressure? They had a golden hand and folded it. Granted a CEO has to take risks to progress the growth of the company, but what he cannot do is ignore what they were successful at. Like in any business SWOT analysis, starting with strengths and weaknesses, you improve your strengths and risk the weaknesses. For the past 4-5 years, AMD has been risking the strengths and improving their weaknesses.
I've never seen such a failure of upper management since Audigy made the blunder of completely focusing on their strengths and ignoring everything else. AMD has completely lost their competitive edge. Without it, well, you can see with all the red ink AMD has to share with their shareholders.
R&D and it's efficiency is only the tip of the ice burg they'll have to improve. What they have to worry about now is finding a new target market for their processors which by keeping manufacturing prices down could of helped however they completely ignored from day one. They also need to offer better platform support because their major weakness is their manufacturing. To why on earth AMD's marketing department are trying to sell things their manufacturing and partnered chip makers can't deliver is beyond any explanation I can give. They're obviously not setting any real obtainable goals for themselves. They failed every goal this year. The only goal I can see they obtained this year was merging with ATi and doing so just for the sake of growth. Oh yes, and they did shrink to 65nm after all ready switching to DDR2, which made everybody who owned a 90nm DDR2 K8 so enthusiastic to upgrading. (SARCASM).
DrMrLordX - Monday, November 19, 2007 - link
Honestly the only reason to wait is if you're looking to upgrade an existing AM2 system.Tesselator - Monday, November 26, 2007 - link
I wonder if it means anything that there is no such thing as LightWave 9.5??
The highest version is 9.3.1 and it JUST became available 11-20-2007 and there are no "special", "early", or "advanced" releases from NewTek for anyone in any way shape or form. Oh well, it"s good for a chuckle at NewTek I guess. :)
TechLuster - Monday, November 19, 2007 - link
I'm surprised, but happy, that I'm apparently not the only one who remembers the title of Anand's Core 2 review.