I can not wait to get my grubby hands on my phenom x4. I do alot of simulations as amd's cpu's are the bees knees for them. I have been reading how people are saying that intel has 3.0Ghz and amd is only at 2.4 Ghz etc etc, boys and girls, if you go look at the benchmarks on tomshardware some of amd's cpu's clocked at 2.4Ghz are on the par with intel cpu's at 3.0Ghz. Don't like numbers misguide you! Just ask yourself who has the better chip architecture?

I dont see the latest phenom choices being any better than my Dual Core 6000 at 3.2 ghz. In gaming or every day apps. I dont want to go backwards in speed.

AMD is really going to hurt with these prices I think. Intel released the first Quad core at $800 dollars and then after they got a good yeild dropped it to $266 but left one(which was discontinued) at $800 and the EE editions at $999.

My only reason why AMD will hurt is unless they took the long delay time to get a good yeild they will lose a lot of money on these chips where as Intel is already yeilding good numbers per wafer on the 45nms so they are able to introduce the prcoessors in the same price range of the predecessors.

Even the Q6600s next up (Q6700 replacement) will be little bit higher than it but clocked higher stock and more cache and less heat/power usage.

I hope AMD knows what they are doing. I hope they aren't trying to do a price war right now cuz they bled a lot and can't afford to anymore.

To Lord Irish,
"amd's cpu's clocked at 2.4Ghz are on the par with intel cpu's at 3.0Ghz." Uh What? The current Intel Core 2 Duos are about a 500mhz off from AMDs but in the other direction. A 2.4ghz Core2(e6600) is as fast as a 2.9-3.0ghz AMD cpu. No doubt the P4 was a higher clock speed then a AMDs cpus but slower. But that was almost a year and a half ago.

can't wait to buy one. planning on getting the 2.4 GHz one. hope they overclock well.

"if you go look at the benchmarks on tomshardware some of amd's cpu's clocked at 2.4Ghz are on the par with intel cpu's at 3.0Ghz."

And just where are these numbers again? Because I don't see anything supporting this beyond a shadow of a doubt.

I'm pretty sure he's talking about athlons vs P4's

In that case althlon x2's make a joke out of intel.

But,core 2 duos are on par at 2.4ghz compaired to a 3ghz amd x2.

I think LORD IRISH was referring to Agena vs. Kentsfield and not Brisbane vs. Conroe

If you bothered to read the article you see that it states that AMD cannot touch Intel for the high end (>$500) chips. Why is this? Because AMD's technology doesn't touch Intels new design.

You state you do "alot of simulations" and AMD products are superior in your testing. I ask you, have you ever run one of your "simulations" on a Penryn based system? Or have you build a system based on a top offering from Intel vs the same tests on a top offering from AMD? If you put systems side by side that use top offerings from both companies you will quickly give up your AMD loyalty.

AMD may have had a bright spot in its past with a superior chip design, and it may again sometime in the future, but that is hardly the case for current offerings from both cpu companies. Move out of the past and into the present.

Benchmark: 3dmark06-cpu
AMD Athlon 64 3800 Processor(2.4GHz): 954
and
Intel Pentium 540 Prescott(3.2Ghz) : 963

Intel is really beating AMD hard right now, To hate Intel for this is plain retarded no matter what the business practices they do, does it really matter? Do you really care? Some people defend these companies as if they are going to get some sort of compensation from them.

I don't buy because of a particular brand or because the particular company happens to be the "underdog", to do so to me seems silly. In my case I started with two computers one being a Pentium 3 at 1000 mhz and an Athlon 900 mhz and both where fantastic computers for me atleast. One thing I noticed was that people tend to defend a particular company because they own something from them, its human nature to defend what is yours even if its a processor...lol. But to bash someone or to actually hope that a company goes down is pretty stupid in this case wether its directed towards AMD or Intel. People need to learn to shut up, think about it and decide.

I personally decided to go with the Athlon 64 for my first upgrade ever and then I went up to the Athlon X2 because theses were better buys for my needs. Eventually I went into my first overclock with a Core 2 Duo because it was a better choice at the time. Major advancements happen with competitions ie. wars and the space race, if there is no one to beat why bother rush into making things better? I really hope AMD can get up once again its looking really bad its always have been for AMD. AMD has woken Intel up an this time it really counts, for Intel its a battle to be the winner of it all, and I dont blame them. No one starts a business to lose or to be a push over. For AMD this is the true test of survival. AMD does not have the raw power of Intel or nVidia's stretegy or position in the playing field. AMD needs to stop and think but in this case you cant stop to do so means failure. The only real hope for AMD to at least be "head to head" consistently is to have some sort of backing or to be bought by Samsung.

Its gona be pretty interesting these next few years for AMD in general, And also with ATI since they are one in the same.

For me im just gona sit still for a while, I want to see how the next gen quad cores are gona be as well and the next gen DX10 video cards. From what I can see it might just be an Intel quad processor which will even things out for me with three generations with AMD and three with Intel. I wonder who will be my 7th gen processor...

As for video cards I just got my two 8800 GT cards which were perfect for my Core 2 Duo set up. DX 10.1 does not bother me I have a homeless 1950 Pro and 4 7600 GT cards maybe I will sell these for an ATI HD 3xxx series card. I cant wait for the benchies...

The pricing on these would suggest that these will not be vastly better than Intel's current offerings on the "low end" quads.

The window for tri-core is going to be incredibly small if the low end quad is ~$260, the top bin dual is probably going to be in the $200 range (?) - where is the tri going to fit?

To the author: listing prices online these days unfortunately doesn't mean availability... exactly how many 2.0GHz Barcelona's were available for purchase after the Sept launch? Can you even get a 2GHz part now nearly 2 months after launch? While these are desktops and should be better in terms of availability (than server), I still could easily see a paper launch of the top bin (or two) for the first few months - hopefully I'm wrong...

"It is more likely that the company will drop the prices of its X2 chips to protect its higher-margin X4 processors..."

Considering the X2 chips are half the Si area of a X4 chip and yield better, this would be yet another horrible business decision for AMD. Better to make more profit on X2 chips which will be higher volume and constrict the X4 availability either through supply or jacking the price up to lower demand. Sure AMD loses in the small quad market, but they'll make more money that way.

You don't protect margin on a low volume part (X4) by eroding margins on your high volume parts - come on man, business 101...

Provided the yield of X4 is acceptable, AMD requires some time to have enough fault of X4 to create X3.

When AMD can ship the X3, the time may be ended for the X2 which will be the lowest entry level product for them already.

"Benchmark: 3dmark06-cpu
AMD Athlon 64 3800 Processor(2.4GHz): 954
and
Intel Pentium 540 Prescott(3.2Ghz) : 963 "

It has already been stated that P4 was inferior to AMD at the time.

But Intel's Core2Duo is far superior to anything that AMD has.

Looking at the benchmarks found at ExpReview (SuperPi, 3DMark06 & Crysis) recently, Phenom X4 is definitely SLOWER clock per clock. $300 bucks for a slower CPU? No thanks! Disappointing...

seems like AMD is going to play the k6-2 till they develop their next iron fisted chip.

AMD should perhaps stop chasing Intel and start chasing Nvidia, and also focus on the fusion chips (CPU with GPU). Right now they need money, not prestige.

I looked on the benchmark on expreview.com that a previous poster mentioned. After seeing tom's test the difference cache made I'd love to see AMD not skimp on the cache as it might very well bring it on par with the Intel offering or at least much closer. AMD has cut cache a lot on their offerings, is cache in short supply AMD? Or is it that you guys just don't give anymore? I'm not dedicated to either brand but the death of AMD; no more competition in the market would only be detrimental to us the consumers.

Guys, Lord Irish is Sharikou... he knows not what he speaks.

To Lord Irish -- Prescot went out of production long ago, Intel's flagship line up is the Core 2 Duo, it out classes anything from AMD clock for clock... AMD is currently competing on price, and it is showing in the bottom line.

"Benchmark: 3dmark06-cpu
AMD Athlon 64 3800 Processor(2.4GHz): 954
and
Intel Pentium 540 Prescott(3.2Ghz) : 963 "

Come on dude... change your system clock.. its 07th Nov 2007. You are referring to some old processors, in fact, intel revised their core2duo 2-3 times with new features since last year.

You mentioned about simulations right, well... simulations are much to do with pure number crunching and access to large data sets. With Intel's new radix16 division algorithms and large caches.. they can really boast about their superiority in number crunching game. If you are doing simulations, GFLOPS would be the greatest benchmark to check on. If you don't believe it, run superPI.

Why are you only giving benchmarks of old CPU's?
The C2D and AM2 have been out for over a year now.

You talk about Tom's Hardware and their benchmark comparisons of old CPU's, but when you look at the new CPU's, the C2D destroy the new AMD processors...not to mention that Intel's new processors are on average able to be overclocked by 80%, while AMD's can't overclock nearly as well giving Intel an even larger performance advantage.

Price/Performance, there really is no comparison, Intel is far cheaper for the amount of performance you get.

Not to mention, the C2D don't get nearly as hot and don't consume as much energy as the AM2's.

The new Intel processors are gonna be 45nm, meaning even less heat and energy consumption.

Sorry for the long-winded rant.

"Benchmark: 3dmark06-cpu
AMD Athlon 64 3800 Processor(2.4GHz): 954
and
Intel Pentium 540 Prescott(3.2Ghz) : 963"

And you're point is...? That was well over a generation of technology ago. Who cares about that? Now the C2D architecture has hammered the supposedly superior architecture that AMD is carrying (maybe they are still going to surpise us when their old technology is alreay being phased out, just as a slap in the face for Intel! Yeah, that's it!).

The only thing you've indicated by giving those number is that we should wait to see benchmarks before buying. But here you are, ready to buy the processor the second it hits the market. You sound like a real amature (and this is coming from an amature).

But if you still want to be a hasty little amature, then just look at AMD's pricing scheme because it already tells all. As was already mentioned in a previous post, weak prices = weak performance. If AMD's product was superior, you can bet your left nut that they wouldn't make it 3x cheaper than Intel's flagship processor.

maybe :)

I wonder if it's possible. Slap 2 Phenoms together, 8 cpu's in one die. Since they have the only native quad core chips on the market, they should go the Intel Duo route and double up. Even the X3 doubled would be nice.

[Are you serious? Can you imagine AMD doubling-up their native quad-core after investing an entire design cycle into developing the native quad-core, the better alternative to Intel's dual dual-core design? I don't see it happening, though you're right, it probably should. -Rick]

I found only 2 reviews (although there were alot of links to those reviews), those reviews are both biased. One of them is putting a 2.0ghz phenom against a 3.2ghz athlon x2, and the second is putting the x4 at bus speed of 200mhz against 3 intel processors with a bus speed of 333mhz. IF either of these are real benchmarks (witch i doubt) they are obviously not very good benchmarks.

I will wait untill they come out to pass my judgment, however I think it will do better than everyone thinks it will.

Welcome to 2007 - nearing 2008. Where have you been for the last two years? The stats you are quoting are no longer relevant today except from a historical perspective.

I hadn't really thought of that, x2 will most likely die off sometime in the middle of next year and then x3 priced @ x2 levels will be the sweet spot.
That's the only thing AMD might have going for them at this point - hope their x3 chips are good enough to beat Duos from Intel and offer them at the same price.

Hey bro - you work at AMD right? Haven't you always sold your processors by spreading misinformation on the Internet? Why stop now? You Phenom will be nice and slow for your simulations while people with Core2 architecture are smoking you homeboy.

If only we could use Cell processors to power our gaming rigs instead of the crap that we keep getting from Intel and AMD. Cell processors are technologically speaking years ahead of anything Intel and AMD have. Cell processors have essentially 8 cores that can operate at up to 4ghz, producing over 200 gigaflops of power while an Intel Quad core can only provide about 20 Gigaflops total. Pairing a Cell processor with a 8800 GTX would definatly take computer gaming to another level entirely in terms of graphics and physics. And to top it all off we could probally purchase a Cell processor for about $100, after all, there's one in the PSIII and the PSIII only costs $400 bucks and that includes a hard drive, video card, blue ray DVD player.....

No consumer should want the only competitor of a major chip industry to die. That would mean no choices to select from and also higher prices. I don't think pitting a cpu that is priced at $300 and one that is $900 is fair at all.

I have 2 C2D systems and my latest one is an X2 because for the price I was willing to spend, that was the better cpu.

Bottom line... I buy in the interest that I am getting the better cpu for my dollar Intel of AMD.

Ken- While you are on point about the cell processor's price and the price point of the PS3. Unfortunately, you aren't taking into account that a console is not a multi-purpose machine like a desktop PC. It could be, I guess. That and you should really look at the cell processor's yields per wafer. They had a hell of a time with these things actually getting all 8 cores to work. The PS3 was designed to be able to work around faulty cores (which they do well) and are designed to work on only 4 or 5 (I think) at the minimum. The problems that they had with this was that the cell processors produced were being installed with only 5 or 6 operational cores. Would you like to buy a quad-core C2D with only 1 working core out of the box? That's the problem with the cell processor.

New QC from AMD are slower in raw power, right.
But they also have much better powersaving features like clock each core independently or turn 3 coress off when not under load and few more whitch are for me more interesting then pure power.
Acording to applications, they are still not optimized for AMD QC, but they are optimized for intel mostly. And of course new chipset from AMD and nvidia are not still out in public and we could expect some patches, new revisions, bioses and drivers, so its too soon say if AMD can catch intel or not.

Geez, will some people read a little about system architecture before parroting Sony's press releases. The cell is designed for specially compiled and heavily optimized code. It is not "years ahead anything Intel and AMD have" it's just a special design that runs a certain kind of code very fast.

You make a good point, but you have to remember that Intel and AMD do do that. They sell processors with half or 3/4 of the cache disabled because it is faulty. They will also clock down processors that aren't stable at higher clocks. This is what Allendale is, a faulty Conroe. The only difference with the Cell is that it is almost entirely logic so they have a much higher probability of a bad core than does a traditional dual or quad core. I also think that the threshold that they have for a "faulty" processor is 1 bad SPU, so 7 good ones is acceptable. This is why the yeild is so poor, not because the process is much worse.

Lord Irish and I are going to hit the pub, to celebrate the end of the 20th century! Who's with us?

The Cell procesor is not a x86 processor, nor is a general purpose processor. So unless you want to rewrite all code and jerry rig Cell processors to run gerneral purpose code it will not run an OS. It is closer to that of a DSP. It does very few operations but it does them fast.

I'm a AMD stock holder. I want to see native quad core DUO, hehe. If Intel had a quad core on a single wafer they double up. Frankly I'd demand a good reason from AMD if they don't double there Phenom. If the HT can handle 8 cores on one die with up to 1/2/4 die(s) for one MB there's no reason not to do it. AMD would keep there scaling advantage even after Intel loses their FSB.

Even if the Phenom prices are cheaper, what about performance(no reliable benchies yet)? Also what about power usage, and OC'ing capability?

It could be that your "simulations" had their code optimized to run on AMD CPUs

Ken, I think you are greatly overestimating the power of the Cell processor. While the Cell is an amazing stream processor it is a terrible general purpose CPU. It's architecture is not suited to general purpose computing at all. It's basically an old (G3 era) PowerPC core with 8 high speed floating point units derived from the AltiVec units on G4 and G5 PowerPCs. The Cell's main strength is that it can process a stream of floating point operations insanely quickly but it is at the expense of every other type of computing task. As for the price of the Cell, Sony is taking a hit on every console sold and they are getting the Cells with defects. You can buy a PCIe add-in board that has a Cell chip to be used as a co-processor but they are in the 4 and 5 figure range and there isn't much software that can use them outside of scientific modelling. Funny that you should mention the Cell 8800 Ultra as the PS3 is a Cell and the RSX GPU which is basically an 8800 GTS with less RAM so if your theory that the combo would be "another level entirely in terms of graphics and physics" why is it that the XBox 360 using a lowly 3 core PowerPC CPU and computers with just a dual core CPU and an 8600GT play the same games (Oblivion comes to mind) with the same or better graphics and physics?

I have been an AMD enthusiast since the K6, I also build and repair systems. Athlon cpu's have always been 95% of my business, and that figure will only increase with the new chips. I have said for the past 18 months (since the c2d) "dont write AMD off just yet". I still believe it.
Have any of the critics actually seen an Athlon 6000 or 6400 perform? They are kidding themselves to disregard these as 'old hat'. I take benchmarks with a grain of salt, real world performance is the only true way to evaluate a cpu. For me, and for my clients, AMD is still king, and will stay that way. Bring on the new chips!

that core count doesn't mean a tremendous amount without multi threaded applications to feed them?

thought they do beat the single cores, hardware is years ahead of the software. has any gamer really used all the power their quad core can provide? sure a intel quad core can punch out 20gflops. on a supercomputer with a custom written application to feed it that much data (and more than just that single processor, too).

my guess is probably not.
don't quote me though.

Pairing a Cell with a GTX is stupid. Even though your cell can calculate the physics for trillions of objects in one scene, it wont matter when your video card can only render a million of those objects. Thats why at high res, the video card is the bottleneck, even on the fastest processors out there. Tossing in a cell wont help one bit.

The cell is good for number crunching (right now). Its not ready for mainstream consumer computing, but perfect for massive amounts of parallel calculations. Soon, i will agree with you, but we have no need for the cell yet.

Of course, thats not to detract from the power of the cell, which is impressive. Make it a CISC and it can put up a fight. The consumer PC world has given up on RISC, and quite frankly, doesn't want that architecture anymore.

because it was trying to make history. They were the first CPU manufacturer to create a 1 ghz processor, first to 2 ghz and 3. After there was no way to push the silicon further, and no way to lose the battle for history, they decided that they ought to beat AMD in performance. Which they did with one complete design change. AMD is the smaller company, the under-dog. Intel has vastly superior resources in comparison to AMD (more employees and money). Therefore, Intel will set the pace and the rules. I dont agree with Intels' decision to go with DDR3 and screw the public with the increased cost and marginal performance gain, but thats just how Intel runs the show.

Its proabably over my head, but I find it ironic that as intel releases a 9650, AMD releases a 9700. Wasn't AMDs last line ending in 6000 or was it 5000? Im too lazy to look.

The floating point capabilities of the cell are great; but using that as a basis for good overall performance is a little naive. If all applications did were crunch floating point that would be great; but the reality is AMD and Intel processors execute multiple instructions per clock tick; and use branch predictors, etc.

The Cell is designed to compensate for this with compiler assistance, in which prepare-to-branch instructions are created. For double-precision, as often used in personal computers, Cell performance drops by an order of magnitude, but still reaches 14 GFLOPS.

How can you justify a extra 800 for the best that Intel has to offer, while I will use the AMD 5600 and the Intel E6550, both great chips are performe about the same in benchmarks and while there is a almost $20 difference in the price, Intel being a little higher. The only advantage that the AMD crushing E6800 and E6700 series have on both chips is what 30 seconds better on this video compression software, 15 seconds better on this anti-virus scanner, or a whopping 30 frames more when both the cheaper chips are pushing around 100 frames. People give me a break you can't care this much. Oh and since this is the internet and I can't rant a rave and be more right that everyone else on the internet I would like to point yes AMD chips have been overpriced to at some points but most Intel chips have always been that and the only reason that we the consumer have affordable competitive products from Intel is the fact that AMD is around.

Just to clarify: The Cell BE CPU has 1 central PPE and 8 SPE units. All PS3s use 7 SPEs with one disabled for yield reasons. One of the 7 active SPEs is reserved for use by the OS and the other 6 are available in games. The software doesn't need to "work around" faulty cores and there won't be users who are shortchanged by getting less working SPEs than advertised.

Since AMD has a different architecture than Intel, making a large impact on the quad core scene will have a large impact on benchmarks in the future. By selling a large amount of quad cores and working closely with developers, AMD's quad core processors will prove to be a worthy opponent to Intel's quad core processors as more multi-threaded programs will be written that are optimized for the AMD architecture.

Since there are many different differences between Intel and AMD architecture (integrated memory vs. chipset memory, native quad core vs. dual-dual core quad core, Hyper Transport vs. FSB), who ever gets their product out in larger numbers with greater support will have programs made for their architecture and therefore will be faster in benchmarks. It is possible to make standard multi-threaded programs without using a specific architecture, however using a specific architecture will bring about numerous benefits, increased speed/quality among them.

At this point it is hard to figure out which processor is truly better since software affects the performance of a processor so much. Because Intel got their quad core processors out first, programs are more likely to favor Intel processors vs. AMD processors. If AMD manages to have a respectable market share of quad core processors, we may see a different trend in future benchmarks even when using older processors.

i dont want to wait any more.........
i will go to the amd office and steel it if neccesary.........
i want it right now

I too have fixed a lot of AMDs, and agree that they arent going anywhere soon. However, I think that we work mostly on AMDs because AMD systems seem to break easier. I dont blame this on AMD though. AMD had usuially been the most bang for the buck, and people use them for budget PCs. Budget PCs always had cheaper quality all arround, and therefore give us more business. Now Intel is the cheapest, and I'm betting a year from now that we will see a major influx of intel repairs. Macs too are coming down in price, and are beginning to have more issues as well.
It would seem to me that people should buy the more expensive brand, not because it's better, but because you will see it as better and want parts to go with it of similar quality, then it lasts much longer, and people wont waste their money of repairs later down the line.

I dont remember where I found the benchmark (somewhere on extrem