After initial disappointment with the original Phenom processors, AMD showed off its upcoming 45nm ‘Deneb’ desktop chip – now confirmed as Phenom II – for reviewers at an event in Texas this week, and overclocked the second-generation quad-core part to what some observers said was 6.3GHz.The company reached such clock speeds by using liquid nitrogen at an amazing -196C to cool the processor – apparently the new AMD design works flawlessly from -200C to +100C.
Of course not many people have access to such extreme cooling methods but the demo should at least show that the new Phenom II processors are scalable when it comes to clock speeds and quite stable at high frequencies.
The Phenom II parts were also able to hit 4GHz with air cooling and 5GHz with dry ice cooling. By comparison, Intel's top Core i7 processor listed as a 3.2 GHz part has been overclocked to 4.5 GHz on air cooling alone and some claim to have taken it to 5.7GHz using liquid nitrogen. The top Phenom II chip, due out sometime in the first quarter of 2009, will reportedly list as 3.0 GHz off the shelf.
Showing posts with label amd phenom review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label amd phenom review. Show all posts
AMD's Phenom X3 8750 Review part2
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AMD's Phenom X3 8750 Review
AMD's Phenom X3 8750 test: CineBench 9.5
AV Digital Content Creation / Media Encoding
Virtualdub / DivX 6.7
Virtualdub 1.7.1 and higher with DivX 6.7 are optimized for SSE4 instructions to provide a significant performance gain over encoding in SSE2 mode. A 66 MB mpg file was converted to AVI format using the DivX 6.7 CODEC.
The CODEC settings were specified as Experimental SSE4 full search set to:
# Disabled
# Enabled using SSE2 / Enabled using SSE4 (Yorkfield)
# with Enhanced multithreading enabled for each mode
All Intel CPU-related data shown were acquired using the ASUS P5K3 with DDR3 running at the highest memory frequency supported for any given CPU - depending on the host bus frequency specification of the processor. Since the memory runs in syncronous mode at its fastest setting, the 1333 MHz processors (333 MHz bus clock) were capable of taking advantage of the same memory frequency, whereas the 1067 MHz CPUs (266 MHz bus clock) were running DDR3 at 1067 MHz data rate and the P4 840 Extreme Edition accessed the memory at 800 MHz. All Phenom-related data were obtained with the ASUS M3A32 MVP-Delux.
AMD's Phenom X3 8750: Gaming Performance 3DMark '06
It is somewhat ironic that the major driving force for computer development, namely gaming, also appears to be the one genre of application that is using the most anachronistic code. In other words, games like Crysis etc are essentially single-threaded and can't take advantage of multiple cores. To the excuse of Crysis and other similar games it has to be said that CPU performance is really not the limiting factor here at all, rather it is the graphics system that holds back gaming performance. Nonetheless, there is a silver lining on the horizon, Epic with their Unreal Engine is taking over the gaming world with an entire slew of the currently best games out there, from Bioshock to UT3 and Timeshift and to add the icing to the cake, all those games are multithreaded. Aside from real games, there is still, however, the mother of all gaming CPU measurements, that is 3DMark '06. Even if it has hardly any practical value, it is an interesting measure of multithreaded processor performance. Needless to say that we are talking about the CPU benchmark only.
AMD's Phenom X3 8750 Review
source
AMD's Phenom X3 8750 test: CineBench 9.5
Single and multi-processor performance in Cinebench10's 3D Render Engine, higher is better. Again, we are looking at approximately 75% of the X4 performance.
The bottom line here is that there do not seem to be any averse effects of an un-even number of core or of the asymmetric distribution of active cores across the die. As long as the application is really CPU limited, the performance scales almost perfectly with the number of execution units and the frequency they are running at.
AMD's Phenom X3 8750AV Digital Content Creation / Media Encoding
Virtualdub / DivX 6.7
Virtualdub 1.7.1 and higher with DivX 6.7 are optimized for SSE4 instructions to provide a significant performance gain over encoding in SSE2 mode. A 66 MB mpg file was converted to AVI format using the DivX 6.7 CODEC.
The CODEC settings were specified as Experimental SSE4 full search set to:
# Disabled
# Enabled using SSE2 / Enabled using SSE4 (Yorkfield)
# with Enhanced multithreading enabled for each mode
All Intel CPU-related data shown were acquired using the ASUS P5K3 with DDR3 running at the highest memory frequency supported for any given CPU - depending on the host bus frequency specification of the processor. Since the memory runs in syncronous mode at its fastest setting, the 1333 MHz processors (333 MHz bus clock) were capable of taking advantage of the same memory frequency, whereas the 1067 MHz CPUs (266 MHz bus clock) were running DDR3 at 1067 MHz data rate and the P4 840 Extreme Edition accessed the memory at 800 MHz. All Phenom-related data were obtained with the ASUS M3A32 MVP-Delux.
AMD's Phenom X3 8750: Gaming Performance 3DMark '06
It is somewhat ironic that the major driving force for computer development, namely gaming, also appears to be the one genre of application that is using the most anachronistic code. In other words, games like Crysis etc are essentially single-threaded and can't take advantage of multiple cores. To the excuse of Crysis and other similar games it has to be said that CPU performance is really not the limiting factor here at all, rather it is the graphics system that holds back gaming performance. Nonetheless, there is a silver lining on the horizon, Epic with their Unreal Engine is taking over the gaming world with an entire slew of the currently best games out there, from Bioshock to UT3 and Timeshift and to add the icing to the cake, all those games are multithreaded. Aside from real games, there is still, however, the mother of all gaming CPU measurements, that is 3DMark '06. Even if it has hardly any practical value, it is an interesting measure of multithreaded processor performance. Needless to say that we are talking about the CPU benchmark only.
AMD's Phenom X3 8750 Review source
AMD Phenom X4 9950 & 9350e Review -part 3-
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Same trends with Cinebench 10.
Again with Pov-RAY AMD just can't compete with the 9300 though it is $40 more expensive.
Good scores here overall from AMD.
Valve's benchmarks give us very similar results. Update: We re-ran some tests using Cinebench 10 as the benchmark with a Radeon HD 4870 for power consumption. Finally let's look at power consumption.
| Phenom 9350e | Phenom 9950 BE | |
| Idle | 195 | 225 |
| Load | 213 | 275 |
The Phenom 9350e has excellent power ratings for a quad core just barely hitting 200W on the 780a. We didn't have time to test on a 780G but it should be much lower load consumption at around 150W so for home theater PCs or other low power machines the combination of the 780G and 9350e or 9150e is unbeatable. For a 140W TDP for the 9950 it also doesn't draw too much more power.
AMD Phenom X4 9950 & 9350e Review -part 2-
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We used Asus' Crosshair II Formula 780a motherboard for overclocking using the Zero Therm NV120. Not adjusting the voltage we were able to hit 3GHz stable, a new high for Phenoms, but adjusting the voltage to 1.425v we were able to hit 3.2GHz stable and reach 3.3GHz though it blue screened in 3DMark. This was a 600MHz stable overclock, the best yet for AMD's Phenom.
Trying to overclock the low wattage 9350e didn't fair as well moving only from 2GHz to 2.34GHz despite increasing the voltage heavily.
Here's our current test system.
| Mother Board | Asus Crosshair II Formula |
| CPU | Various |
| Video Card | Asus 9600 GT Top |
| Memory | Corsair XMS Dominator 2GB |
| Hard | Western Digital Raptor |
| =Case | Tsunami Thermaltake |
| Display | Samsung 20" LCD Westinghouse W4207 |
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Our test OS was Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 with nForce driver revisions 175.19 and chipset driver revision of 18.11. V-sync was disabled for graphic tests.
For our games testing we used lower graphic settings in order to stress the processor and relieve the graphics card from being the bottleneck.
UT3 shows the 9950 as a great competitor with the more expensive Intel Q9300.
Unsurprisingly the 9950 isn't too far from the 9850 in Crysis. The Intel Q9300 comes out on top here.
Not too many shocks here in 3DMark 2006 but the 9950 does over 100 points more than the 9850.
AMD Phenom X4 9950 & 9350e Review -part 1-
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ATI has been on a roll lately starting with the Radeon 3870 last year, the 780G earlier this year, Puma, and the Radeon 4850 and 4870 which swept the rug out from under Nvidia and beat them handily in price and performance as well as adding on extra features. The question remains though for AMD's CPU division, when will they start flourishing as they did not so long ago now. Can the Intel goliath be toppled again? I can tell you now with the two new processors AMD is releasing today they aren't going to knock Intel off the top but are three new processors they are releasing today to add to the line: the Phenom X4 9950, 9350e, and 9150e.
| Model | CPU Freq. | MC & HT(x2) Freq. | Max TDP | Core Count | Price |
| X4 9950 Black Edition | 2.6GHz | 2.0GHz | 140W | 4 | $235 |
| X4 9350e | 2.0GHz | 1.8GHz | 65W | 4 | $195 |
| X4 9150e | 1.8GHz | 1.8GHz | 65W | 4 | $175 |
With the release of the 9950 Black Edition AMD steps up from the 9850 100MHz to 2.6GHz from 2.5GHz but also increases the max TDP to 140W. The Phenom 9950 Black Edition takes over the $235 pricing the 9850 had which will be reduced to $207 starting July 7th, a helpful heads up from AMD. These will still be 9850 Black Editions for a while in the channel but they will move towards normal edition eventually but should be able to get a 9850 Black Edition for a steal in a week.
The other new processors being released are the low wattage quad core processors, the X4 9350e and 9150e which have a max TDP of 65w. Previously 95 was the lowest TDP for Phenoms and it still is for even Intel's lowest clock speed quad core processors giving AMD a 30W advantage here. This could be a boon for HTPCs, file servers, or other computers that are run 24/7.
Other than that though there aren't too many changes to AMD's lineup. We should see some price cuts officially updated some time today on AMD's website but that's about it. So let's move on.
NEW AMD Phenom X4 processors TECH SPECS:
Processor Model / Frequency: X4 9950 / 2.6GHz
Processor Model / Frequency: X4 9350e / 2.0GHz
Processor Model / Frequency: X4 9150e / 1.8GHz
L1 Cache Sizes: 64K of L1 instruction and 64K of L1 data cache per core (512 KB total L1 per processor)
L2 Cache Sizes: 512KB of L2 data cache per core (2MB total L2 per processor)
L3 Cache Size: 2MB (shared)
Packaging: Socket AM2+ 940-pin organic micro pin grid array (micro-PGA)
Fab location: AMD's Fab 36 wafer fabrication facilities in Dresden, Germany
Process Technology: 65-nanometer DSL SOI (silicon-on-insulator) technology
Approximate Transistor count: ~ 450 million
Approximate Die Size: 285 mm2
Memory Controller Type: Integrated 128-bit wide memory controller *
Types of Memory Supported: Support for unregistered DIMMs up to PC2 8500 (DDR2-1066MHz)
Memory Controller Speed: X4 9950: up to 2.0GHz with Dual Dynamic Power Management
X4 9350e: up to 1.8GHz with Dual Dynamic Power Management
X4 9150e: up to 1.6GHz with Dual Dynamic Power Management
HyperTransport 3.0 Specification: X4 9950: One 16-bit/16-bit link @ up to 4.0GHz full duplex (2.0GHz x2)
X4 9350e: One 16-bit/16-bit link @ up to 3.6GHz full duplex (1.8GHz x2)
X4 9150e: One 16-bit/16-bit link @ up to 3.2GHz full duplex (1.6GHz x2)
Total Processor Bandwidth: X4 9950: Up to 33.1 GB/s bandwidth
X4 9350e: Up to 31.5 GB/s bandwidth
X4 9150e: Up to 29.9 GB/s bandwidth
Max Ambient Case Temp: X4 9950: 61o Celsius
X4 9350e: 70o Celsius
X4 9150e: 70o Celsius
Nominal Voltage: X4 9950: 1.05-1.30 Volts
X4 9350e: 1.05-1.125 Volts
X4 9150e: 1.05-1.15 Volts
Max TDP: X4 9950: 140 Watts
X4 9350e: 65 Watts
X4 9150e: 65 Watts
*Note: configurable for dual 64-bit channels for simultaneous read/writes
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