From a reviewer's point of view, it's really interesting to see how the new top model fares against top CPUs from the Phenom series (9850) and competing processors based on Kentsfield core (Q6600). Thus, the second rival in our tests is a processor based on Yorkfield (Q9300). So most users will probably compare Phenom II with much more popular Core 2 Quad. We should keep in mind that the platform (including a motherboard and memory) is too expensive for Core i7 now even with this limitation. But only users of the extreme model may agree to fork out for the 6-GB kit right away. Moreover, they will certainly try to use the three-channel controller. And owners of Core i7 will hardly disable Turbo Boost. Our objective is to provide test conditions as close to real as possible. But this factor is counterpoised by 3 GB of memory, while the other processors are tested with 4 GB. You may find that it's not fair to use automatic overclocking, because Phenom also has an overclocking potential and allows to control its core multipliers individually. We speak of the configuration used in our tests, Turbo Boost and Hyper-Threading enabled. The recommended price for Phenom II X4 940 is $275, so its apparent competitor in our tests is Core i7 920, which recommended price is higher only by $5.
Motherboards just need a proper update - most manufacturers released them back in October-November, last year. These are Socket AM2+ CPUs, that is they are designed for the Phenom platform. The manufacturer also offers a processor with Index 920 (2.8 GHz). We've tested a top model (3.0 GHz) with the unlocked multiplier. But in this case we may hope that such measures may be sufficient to reveal the true potential. If such announcements were made about an old streamlined processor core, squeezed dry after many revisions, we could hardly expect anything interesting.
However, there are some mentions of architectural optimizations. Phenom II processors do not promise many performance-related improvements, as we found out long before the launch of these products: three times as large 元 Cache and higher frequencies owing to the 45-nm fabrication process. In the course of price wars these processors got attractive price tags that really reconciled users with this performance level.
Moreover, Phenom processors are quite popular now, and many users are pleased with them. Our competitors have different approaches to architecture with their own trump cards.Īfter the rollout of Phenoms, which results were apparently below the expected level, a lot of users wondered about the reasons. They had all grounds to expect (at least theoretical) interesting, if not supreme results: victories (at least owing to the expanded floating-point unit and native quad-core design), parity, and sometimes defeats. Many technically literate users (not only apostles of this company) were looking forward to these processors.
This time we'll start with only a brief introduction to theory: we learnt about the ideas behind the AMD K10 core and Phenom processors long before these processors appeared, several years ago actually.