AMD's Phenom Unveiled: A Somber Farewell to K8
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 19, 2007 1:25 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
3D Rendering Performance
We'll start off our look at 3D rendering performance with the latest version of Cinebench, we ran the single and multi-threaded benchmarks and reported the scores below:
Single threaded performance goes to Intel, highlighting a theme you've probably already noticed thus far: Core 2 is far more efficient per clock than Phenom. AMD would need to be at around 2.8 - 2.9GHz to equal the performance of the Core 2 at 2.4GHz in this particular benchmark, even the Phenom 9900 can't cut it.
Looking at the multi-threaded results we see that AMD does gain some ground, but the standings remain unchanged: Intel can't be beat. We can actually answer one more question using the Cinebench results, and that is whether or not AMD's "true" quad-core (as in four cores on a single die) actually has a tangible performance advantage to Intel's quad-core (two dual-core die on a single package).
If we look at the improvement these chips get from running the multi-threaded benchmark, all of the Phenom cores go up in performance by around 3.79x, while all the Intel processors improve by around 3.53x. There's a definite scaling advantage (~7%), but it's not enough to overcome the inherent architectural advantages of the Core 2 processors.
3dsmax 9
As always we have our 3dsmax 9 test, using SPECapc's 3dsmax 8 benchmark files. The numbers we're reporting below are strictly the CPU rendering composite scores:
Here the Phenom 9900 is basically as fast as the Core 2 Q6600, unfortunately for AMD the 9900 doesn't launch until next year and it will launch at a price greater than the Q6600. AMD needs help cutting prices fast if it expects Phenom to remain competitive in the eyes of everyone who doesn't own a Socket-AM2 motherboard.
Lightwave 9.5
We see a similar story in our Lightwave benchmarks, the Phenom 9900 at best can equal the performance of the Q6600 but at worst it looks like AMD needs another 200 - 300MHz to catch up to Intel's cheapest quad-core:
POV-Ray
The POV-Ray benchmark is quite possibly the least kind to AMD out of the group:
Intel's Q6600 is 20% faster than AMD's fastest Phenom due out in Q1, it's 30% faster than Phenom at the same clock speed, and 35% faster at the most competitive price point.
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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.