finally some good news for Phenom. From TomsHardware?? :/

[something_totally_different]

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/11/19/the_spider_weaves_its_web/page42.html

although the full article is about the spider platform, the conclusion that ive linked to gives some encouraging signs for the future of phenom once the prices are normalised as at present many retailers seem to be selling these for more than they should be (the phenom 9500 should be between £146 and £150 inc VAT and the phenom 9600 between £165 and £170 inc VAT. both can be found in the UK for these prices). Whether this is done to cash in on a new chip or to put people off buying it i do not know.

 

[jaykay]

Sadly will go up due to supply. Low supply high demand means crap prices.

 

[schumi84]

Very interesting read, will have to see if these things pan out the way described. Would be good if they did.

 

[drunkenmaster]

well, its simple, ocuk and other uk stores are bumping prices, or their distributors are, amd have an rrp and won't significantly change the prices they sell chips at for a while till their yeilds change and they switch more fabs over to barcelona. they will be sending out chips at a price that lets everyone make a little mark up selling to end user at RRP, thats how the world has worked for decades.

you can preorder a 9500 at £144, though haven't seen 9600 at good prices yet, but a black edition 9600 multi unlocked is supposed to be the same rrp as the normal 9600, so that should be a good seller, and theres no need for dell and the like to want any allocation on black edition chips, because whats a multi unlocked chip going to do any better in their systems at stock. the rrp on the 9600 is £159, and so thats the price we should be able to buy at, rrp on the 9500 is £145, and if you can wait a couple weeks you can get it at that price.

the one area that AMD REALLY should be going after when it comes to building up their name is offering 9500 + 3850 package deals with a 10% saving or something and a 9600 black edition + 3870, and a 9600 black edition + 2x 3870 bundle again saving money. because they own ati they have a lot of flexibility to do that and make a lot of extra sales. 3870 crossfire is already fairly damn cheap setup to get into, making an entire bundle save another 5-10% is just a sign of good faith, something they can clearly do now and would go down very very well i would think.

then, people really like to choose their own mobo's, but if they team'd up with someone to offer a few board, cpu and gpu bundles for even more savings, again, they are putting more amd systems out there, encouraging more gpu and chipset sales, and more upgrades to those systems in the future.

 

[JediFragger]

Sadly will go up due to supply. Low supply high demand means crap prices.

It's true, they're real hard to get hold of atm & pricing is stupid. Personally feel that AMD have released it just to save face & can only offers bits and bobs for the next few weeks at least

Hopefully I'm wrong & we'll have a glut soon

 

[drak3]

I will just upgrade to the new Intel chips. Same money, better product. simple.

 

[mrthingyx]

It's true, they're real hard to get hold of atm & pricing is stupid. Personally feel that AMD have released it just to save face & can only offers bits and bobs for the next few weeks at least

Hopefully I'm wrong & we'll have a glut soon

Hmmm... surely you guys control the pricing? Sure, you have to make a profit, but at the end of the day...? Not a dig at the pricing,as your range is the best I've seen in the UK so far, but I do find it strange that a member of staff is commenting on how expensive the chips are when their stated RRP is in fact lower than what you have them listed for...

At RRP, the CPUs are pretty much the same in terms of bang/£. However, skewiff pricing as a result of new tech/bulk buying does that over quite nicely.

Bottom line? People buying hardware today have never had it better in terms of the technology available.

 

[Corasik]

It's still not the conroe bashing chip that a lot of us were hoping for. Clock for clock it's quite comparible with Kentsfield, and Penryn will increase the lead again slightly. And the odds are that Nehelem will be out long before AMD can release Phenom "2" or whatever they want to call it.

Nice upgrade chip for existing AMD users, but if I was building a new rig right now for mid to high end use, it would still be an intel.

And it looks like intel will have the performance crown for the foreable future. Sure Some phenoms are clocking to 3Ghz... But some Penryns are clocking to 4Ghz on air. So clock for clock Penryn is faster, and it potentially has 1Ghz advantage in clockspeeds.

To be honest, im sure a lot of people have been expecting this, if Phenom was going to 'blow away' intel in performance, AMD would have leaked out some proper benchmarks a lot sooner.

 

[Antar Bolaeisk]

Completely agree with you drunkenmaster,

AMD are really in a position to make a killing here if they plan it right.

If you've the choice to buy a Phenom with an 8800 or an Intel with a 3850 for X amount.

However, you could buy a Phenom with a 3850 for Y amount making a saving of whatever then a package would definitely make an attractive proposition.

 

[cavemanoc]

I will just upgrade to the new Intel chips. Same money, better product. simple.

Simply not true, as Tom's said:

AMD seems to have done its homework when the company set the price for its Phenom processors. The Phenom 9600 is about 13.5% slower than Intel's Q6600 in our benchmarks. On the other hand, its price is also 13.6% lower than that of its direct competitor. Thus, the two products offer practically the same performance for your money.

In the end, if you're looking to make the most of a long-term investment, AMD is without a doubt the better platform choice.

The point is you get 15% less performance for 15% less cash, so £/Mhz you get the same. A very clever policy from AMD, and a good insight into why they have started making big inroads into the server market. While it may not be the platform of choice for the enthusiast (us) for the other 99% who look for value/performance it's a very interesting choice - add in the fact that they have a better projected upgrade path and I'm starting to get tempted...

While we are all disappointed that they haven't produced a directly competing performance part to push intel - I think their new strategy is very, very clever and will see them gain more ground on intel.

But never mind all that - I'm shallow and I think the Spider logo is cooool...

 

[Corasik]

One of the reasons AMD was making inroads into the server market, is Opteron was a good low power, low heat processor.

But at 2.3Ghz Phenom has a TDP of 125W, and at 2.4 it's an incredible 140W. Beating prescott!. Ok, thats at full load... but none the less a processor like that means larger UPS requirements, more work for the air conditioning systems, and higher power bills.

Cool and Quiet is pretty clever, especially now phenom can work on a per core basis, but the Penryn QX9650 is a 3Ghz part, and when speedstep kicks in the processor is drawing a little over 3watts, and fully loaded around 73watts. Assuming the Q9300 and Q9450's use less power than the 3Ghz Penryn the server industry will lap them up.

Another area AMD were making inroads in servers were quad+ cpu systems, as P4 based Xeons didnt scale very well. But Core2 Xeon's scaled better to Quad, so intel have been reclaiming marketshare. Also to counter 4x4 intel have V8. Overall Intel now scale nicely to 8 processors, while AMD scale nicely to 16 or so. Sun Microsystems who originally only used their own Sparc processors in servers started offering AMD systems based on Opteron. But now it also offers Intel Xeon systems as well. (Infact Sun have a quad socket server for Xeon, so thats a 16 core server)

Core 2 is making progress in all markets, portable, desktop, and server.

 

[JediFragger]

Hmmm... surely you guys control the pricing? Sure, you have to make a profit, but at the end of the day...? Not a dig at the pricing,as your range is the best I've seen in the UK so far, but I do find it strange that a member of staff is commenting on how expensive the chips are when their stated RRP is in fact lower than what you have them listed for...

Supply & demand dear fellow, there's still not much about and the 9600's have been put back slightly too now so I'm not expecting drops.

Also please remember that some etailers run at a VERY low margin on stuff just to get you through the door as such & rely on the customer making a large-ish order to cover it.

No more talking on pricing now, I think i've covered the bases

Si

 

[simonnance]

Core 2 is making progress in all markets, portable, desktop, and server.

Looks like K10 is pretty competitive for the server sector
http://anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3162

Swings and roundabouts, and pricing will be important, but if the chips allow true throttling on independant cores ect i can see server systems biting the bullet on the higher TDP (which AMD works out differently to Intel anyway IIRC). Especially as FB-DIMMs need more power than conventional DIMMs, and there is no motherboard northbridge to power either.

Oh, and the comparison is against Harpertown (45nm, SSE4, Up to 1600MHz FSB, 12MB Cache) AND Clovertown (65nm), not just the older Clovertown

 

[manveruppd]

AMD seems to be the less expensive than Intel, since the chip giant has already announced that its current high-end platform X38 will be incompatible to the next generation of high-end CPUs at the beginning of next year.

Is this Nehalem they're talking about? I thought that wasn't due till Q3/Q4 08.

 

[deshepherd]

Intel "launched" QX9770 on same day AMD brought out Phenom ... it was "reviewed" on Toms Hardware where they were somewhat taken aback by the fact that it was

- a purely paper launch ... no silicon - Intel gave instructions on how to overclock an existing part to "simulate it"

- it has a faster FSB than X38 will support and thus needs X48

Seemed to indicate that Intel are taking Phenom seriously.

N.b. I think bad initial showing on Phenom is down to a design flaw that is turning out to severly restrict the clock speeds available and once the B3 stepping is out then it may looking a bit different ... so at the moment they are stuck with the problem of waiting for the fixed parts to get through the fab

 

[Vir]

All good but in 2/3 years time you don't wanna still stick with your slow / old motherboard and RAM and the Phenom isn't even THAT fast....

Intel it is for me, I'd rather upgrade more often then put a FAST cpu in an old motherboard with old ram.

 

[cavemanoc]

Actually, my current mobo (DFI Lanparty nf4-d) is nearly 3 years old, and if I had the option to drop a Phenom onto it I would - the overall increase in speed due to ram and chipset improvements doen't particularly worry me. It was a great mobo when it was realeased, and it remains one now. I would much rather take the upgrade path than have to re-invest every time. The fact that my system runs everything I throw at it to my satisfaction speaks volumes about hardware hype - all I really need is an 8800GT and even Crysis would run fine - on a nearly 3 year old mobo with a 2 year old chip (opti 165).

 

[Squink]

The point is you get 15% less performance for 15% less cash, so £/Mhz you get the same.

I thought AMD had been competitive on price for a long time, but Intel pulls away purely because you can get an extra 30-40% from overclocking, whilst AMD chips have much lower headroom. I want AMD to be competitive, but I think they need to be blatantly cheaper to haul back market share.

 

[cavemanoc]

I thought AMD had been competitive on price for a long time, but Intel pulls away purely because you can get an extra 30-40% from overclocking, whilst AMD chips have much lower headroom. I want AMD to be competitive, but I think they need to be blatantly cheaper to haul back market share.

Didn't read the article did we?

Although an ES so perhaps not indicative of the performance of the whole range, the testers got 3.0Ghz from the 2.3Ghz chips they were testing WITHOUT raising the volts above stock and on standard air cooling. That's a 30% clock without trying. It may well be that the Phenoms don't clock as well as the Intels, but it's not true that they don't clock at all.

They are excellent value, and that's what makes them such an interesting prospect, both for now and a couple of years down the road.

 

[Gunni Parker]

As quoted from the overclockers website!

"Real Quad Core. Runs really cool (I'm actually surprised that idle is 32C and load is 44C only. Not really hot at all, compared to the Q6600.

BUT: Gaming still uses only 1 core So I don't get to really use my true Quad-Core processor. Sad

You should buy it anyways if you want a value quad core.

My system: Phenom 9500, Gigabyte 790FX, Crossfire HD 2600XT, 2 x 320GB Hard Drive RAID 0, 2x1GB G.Skill 5-4-4-12, Thermaltake 500W PSU, Zalman CNPS9500AM2

Works beautifully. No regrets on buying this product."

Is this true is doesnt use the full 4 cores in games!