nooo u don't understand what im saying.
phenom at 3.2ghz basiclty unlocks the cache speed.... thats putting it simple
The trick (or quirk) with Phenom appears to be increased HT frequency. This results in a reduced L3 cache latency. As such, the resulting improvement in performance puts it slightly (only slightly) ahead of a Q9650 in 3Dmark06 with the same graphics card...
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=183025&page=12
But this is an interesting result as it would suggest that such a reduction in Cache latency puts the Phenom on a more level clock-for-clock footing than at lower frequencies.
Yes, this is at 3.4GHz. No, not all people will be able to overclock their Phenom chips to reach this level. But not all people can overclock their Q6600s/Q9xxxs to reach said level, either.
The problem is a lot of the review websites
ARE NOT OVERCLOCKING THEIR PHENOMS PROPERLY: they're treating them like Core 2 hardware. As such, they can never get their Phenom samples to the same levels and have to pass verdict on what they have in front of them. Taking one look at Xtremesystems shows that even B2 Phenoms can sit at 3GHz with the 780a chipset.
However, Phenom is not an easy overclock. It spits out a lot more heat than a Core 2 Quad chip (
one of the reasons is the integrated northbridge). It also has a nasty habit of eating m-ATX boards as a result of its power requirements. But high-end AMD boards are cheaper than equivalent Intel ones...
Then there's the odd
perceived 'smoothness' of AMD systems in comparison to Intel ones (which isn't empirically measured but it does crop up on these forums from time to time).
Phenoms are now a relatively acceptable choice for mid-level quad-core systems. They may well not be in a couple of months' time, but hey.
