Aceshardware

jack · Joined: 27 Jun 2007 Posts: 359

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3153

Very sad situation for the AMD and the industry:

- It's finally official: Phenom has a lower clock-to-clock performance compared to 65nm Core2. In many cases overclocked 2.6GHz Phenom was slower than 2.4GHz Core2 Quad. Phenom will not have any chance against 45nm Core2 Quads.

- despite having a lower clock-to-clock performance, Phenon has a higher power consumption than equally clocked 65nm Core2 Quad. Thus Performance/Watt is very poor.

- Phenom's pricing isn't competitive. 2.4GHz Q6600 is faster and cheaper than 2.3GHz Phenom which will cost $283.

- No 2.8GHz Phenoms until Q2 2008.

- AMD even tried to stop sites from doing independent benchmarking of Phenom!!!

Quote:

AMD knew it wouldn't be able to trounce Core 2 with Phenom, especially not at 2.3GHz, so it wanted to control the benchmarking that was done on Phenom. For the first time in as far as I can remember, AMD wanted all benchmarking on Phenom to be done at a location in Tahoe, of course on AMD's dime. AMD would fly us out there, we would spend a couple of days with a pre-configured system and we'd head home to write our stories.
...
Needless to say, I wasn't happy. I refused to go to Tahoe.

Don't get me wrong, a free trip to Tahoe is a wonderful thing, but Phenom deserved better. It deserved dedicated testing, it deserved a thorough review, not a quick glance over a couple of days. And I had a feeling that you all would agree. The time for AMD-sanctioned testing expired months ago, if Phenom was launching this week, we were going to have a proper review of it.

These days, AMD seems to be learning a little too much from the ATI way of doing things. If AMD had its way, today's Phenom review would have been done from beautful Lake Tahoe, on a system that AMD built, running at a frequency that isn't launching. Now there's nothing wrong with allowing us to preview Phenom under closed conditions, after all, Intel does it, but that's simply not acceptable for a review of a product that's four days away from being in stores. You all want to see a thorough review of Phenom, not some half-assed preview, definitely not after waiting this long for it.

A representative from AMD's PR agency in charge of the Tahoe trip asked me, somewhat surprised, "what, Intel doesn't work like this?".

Blitzkrieg · Joined: 31 Jul 2007 Posts: 64 Location: New Zealand

I am an amd fan, but basically you just straight out have to admit, it is disaster.
How can it have so many improvements and really not seem that much faster than K8.

Richard Van Den Boom · Joined: 13 Aug 2007 Posts: 84

Yep. Agreed.
Well, I guess AMD will be bought by investors who will expect a better management. After all, I guess AMD has too many assets just to disappear.

Blitzkrieg · Joined: 31 Jul 2007 Posts: 64 Location: New Zealand

Meyer is replacing Ruiz as CEO, I certainly hope he can do better.

thibs · Joined: 03 Aug 2007 Posts: 119

Blitzkrieg wrote:

Meyer is replacing Ruiz as CEO, I certainly hope he can do better.

Easy job IMO :lol:

Gabriele Svelto · Joined: 27 Jun 2007 Posts: 290 Location: Milano, Italy

After looking at the review and considering the previous reviews of K10-based Opterons I'm starting to see a pattern: they screwed the whole MC/L3-thingy.

The in-core changes which went into the K10 should have improved performance over K8 however this improvements have been MIA in a lot of benchmarks. The only explanation I can come with is that the MC/L3 controller is holding the core back, all evidence points in that direction: new Opterons having significantly higher unloaded latency compared to K8s, Phenom's MC/L3 being stuck at 2.0 GHz and the consequent poor performance (relatively speaking).

I may be wrong and this is all speculation on my part still I don't see any other potential reason why performance improvements over K8 (clock-for-clock core-for-core) failed to materialize.

JumpingJack · Joined: 05 Oct 2007 Posts: 124

Gabriele Svelto wrote:

After looking at the review and considering the previous reviews of K10-based Opterons I'm starting to see a pattern: they screwed the whole MC/L3-thingy.

The in-core changes which went into the K10 should have improved performance over K8 however this improvements have been MIA in a lot of benchmarks. The only explanation I can come with is that the MC/L3 controller is holding the core back, all evidence points in that direction: new Opterons having significantly higher unloaded latency compared to K8s, Phenom's MC/L3 being stuck at 2.0 GHz and the consequent poor performance (relatively speaking).

I may be wrong and this is all speculation on my part still I don't see any other potential reason why performance improvements over K8 (clock-for-clock core-for-core) failed to materialize.

Unfortunately, the whole IMC/L3 thinging is part of the architectural equation. It isn't the 'goodness' of any one part but how the sum of all those parts work together.

Michael Westman · Joined: 27 Jun 2007 Posts: 24 Location: Amsterdam

Blitzkrieg wrote:

I am an amd fan, but basically you just straight out have to admit, it is disaster.
How can it have so many improvements and really not seem that much faster than K8.

I agree, this is a disaster. Relatively small improvements compared to K8, initial low clock-speed, high power consumption. FFS AMD, you have had 4 years since the initial A64 release and this is the best you can come up with?

I haven't had an Intel processor since Pentium 233 mmx, but I can assure you I'll have a Penryn based cpu in a couple of months. :)

jack · Joined: 27 Jun 2007 Posts: 359

Toms hardware has an interesting comparison between Phenom and fastest Athlon64:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/11/19/the_spider_weaves_its_web/page21.html

It seems that 2.3GHz Phenom is actually slower than fastest 3.2GHz Athlon 64 on average on that benchmark suite.

jack · Joined: 27 Jun 2007 Posts: 359

Gabriele Svelto wrote:

After looking at the review and considering the previous reviews of K10-based Opterons I'm starting to see a pattern: they screwed the whole MC/L3-thingy.

The in-core changes which went into the K10 should have improved performance over K8 however this improvements have been MIA in a lot of benchmarks. The only explanation I can come with is that the MC/L3 controller is holding the core back, all evidence points in that direction: new Opterons having significantly higher unloaded latency compared to K8s, Phenom's MC/L3 being stuck at 2.0 GHz and the consequent poor performance (relatively speaking).

I may be wrong and this is all speculation on my part still I don't see any other potential reason why performance improvements over K8 (clock-for-clock core-for-core) failed to materialize.

I wonder how a K8 based MCM quad core would have performed. IIRC 65W 2.6GHz K8s became available in the Spring, so AMD would have been able to introduce 2.6GHz 130W quad cores about 6 months ago.

jamannetje · Posted: Mon Nov 19, 2007 3:09 pm Post subject:

I wonder if it is possible to deactivate the L3-cache and benchmark that. At the moment I too think that the L3-cache is partly to blame.

Jeschael

Desti · Joined: 09 Aug 2007 Posts: 38

http://www.matbe.com/articles/lire/561/amd-phenom-9600-et-9500/
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/3327-amd-phenom-x4-9600-performance-preview.html

jamannetje · Posted: Mon Nov 19, 2007 3:57 pm Post subject:

In the review of hardwarecanucks I did find some bright spots for AMD. I do not know if this is partly due to GPU drivers but with all game benchmarks the minimum framerate is higher than those of intel.

To me the minimum framerate is more important than the avarage and maximum framerate because it tells most about the playability of a game.

Jeschael

lux_interior · Joined: 26 Jul 2007 Posts: 252

According to hardware.fr Phenom's cache are more efficient than K8's.
They measured latencies of 3, 9 and 20 cycles (resp. L1, L2, L3), against 3 and 22 cycles for A64 (resp. L1 and L2). Throughput is also improved.

See "Vitesse des caches" on the following page and click on the images:
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/694-3/amd-phenom-9600.html

Gabriele Svelto · Joined: 27 Jun 2007 Posts: 290 Location: Milano, Italy

lux_interior wrote:

According to hardware.fr Phenom's cache are more efficient than K8's.
They measured latencies of 3, 9 and 20 cycles (resp. L1, L2, L3), against 3 and 22 cycles for A64 (resp. L1 and L2). Throughput is also improved.

See "Vitesse des caches" on the following page and click on the images:
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/694-3/amd-phenom-9600.html

The same graph shows memory accesses having ~18ns of latency, that's quite unlikely. I don't know how the program they use works but it doesn't seem like it's returning correct information for blocks above 2 MiB unless the prefetcher is playing tricks behind its back.