- Sunday, 29 November 2009
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Headlines without verbs are like pigs without truffles - Mike Magee
Quadcore showdown strikes: Phenom vs. Core 2 Quad
THE TWO CONTENDERS in the quad-core PC world are duking it out today on Extremetech. Although you’d argue this is a bantam weight match, this fight involves AMD’s top performer, the Phenom X4 9850 vs. Intel’s lightweight, the Q9300. Extremetech included an E8500 for relativity. These guys... Well, it appears that even Intel’s cheapest Quad has AMD’s best pinned down under heavy fire. Intel dominated the benchmarks, but Extremetech is pretty coy about it stating that performance is “as you’d expect it”. What you do figure out by the end of the day, is that an E8500 will perform better than a Q3000, is fairly cheaper and really, really kicks AMD in the nether regions. Oh, one word about the Phenom... it runs pretty cool. Carry on.
Cowcotland (don’t mind the zany name, it’s a French site) had access to Alienware latest saucer... uhm... laptop. The 15.4-inch m15x laptop has a 8800M GTX under the hood, as well as a Core 2 Duo T9300. You probably can’t get much better than this in a laptop these days, so just to tease you, let’s say the beast almost reached 10,000 marks in 3DMark’06. Would you like to know more? (English, here)
Every now and then a piece of hardware comes up that makes us hit out forehead with the palm of our hand in disbelief and sheer I-should’ve-thought-of-this-first-ness. That happened to the Hardware Canucks when this piece of hardware landed on their workbench. It’s a Thermaltake Blacx HD Docking Station... yes, a docking station for internal HD’s. Just slide in any 2.5- or 3.5-inch SATA hard drive, and you’re in business. HC liked the performance even though it’s USB 2.0-based. Just avoid knocking stuff around your desk if you’re using one of these.
Hardware Logic is reviewing some serious high-speed kit from Kingston, the Hyper X PC3-13000 two-by-ones. Even though Kingston really made a name for itself as a mainstream and value memory manufacturer, the Hyper X series has made some progress in the enthusiast market, as you can read here. Overclocking these pieces of silicon was a dream, effectively taking them up to 1.85GHz at 8-8-8-20 timings. That’s >225MHz over the factory setting, not too shabby, eh?
Jason at Big Bruin did a nice review of another Kingston kit, the Hyper X PC2-9600 2x512MB. Effectively rated at 1.2GHz, this memory is targeted at the highest end user that hasn’t yet migrated to DDR3. This memory will match up nicely to Wolfdales and Conroes with 333MHz or 400MHz buses, because of its nature. It’s performance is an iota away from DDR3 speeds... Final speeds were 1280MHz with a “mild” 80MHz overclock – but enough to smash the competition. Read about the bombshell here. µ
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They are comparing two chips, one at $299 and one at $290, to one at $235.

The Phenom only costs 80% of the Intel chips, and the performance is way more close than that in some cases, and much worse than that in other cases.

So the thing you are really interested in is what is most cost effective for what you are doing, and the answer changes between the two vendors depending on what it is you want to do with it.
Not a bad review, except when the decided to do the read and write speed tests.

Graphs starting at non-zero always put me off reviews, they are typically used to show bigger differences than what actually exist, in this case they make a 3% difference in speed and latency look about 20-50%.
If we think logically, most of the people who will buy Phenoms are the ones who already have AMD CPU and have Mb that supports Phenoms. I am one of those,and being that it is my media PC would like to know what is the gain from one X2 4400 to 9550 or 9750?
After reading Tom's Ultimate Ram Speed Test, I was reminded yet again of how insignificant of a role memory plays in the grand scheme of things. These bleeding edge memory reviews are getting a bit annoying. If people only realized that a low-end $45 2gb kit will trail that $150 set by only 3-5 percent in performance they'd be buying the cheap kit everytime.
I'm really starting to think that the quad core design has a data bottle-neck of some kind.

I remember Microsoft having an affinity filter that could be used in multi CPU Servers. I got the feeling that it worked by locking a core to a particular job/ process.

Remember back to when the VIA Apollo-133a chipset came out there was no interleaving on the memory and a dual would run slower than a BX board until the fix was implemented.
It was soon learnt that a dual was not faster than a single, but it could do more at the same time

It it with the thoughts above that have me thinking that there is possibly too much confusion of data going in and out of a Quad core CPU.
If only a single application was running you would get maximum results, but our PC's have lots of threads from all sorts of system processors and other software running.
There must be contention in there slowing things down while decisions are made of where its going or where its coming from?

Maybe The Intel design of sticking two dual cores together is the winning point, that dual core is the biggest we can go without loosing too much performance?
No fair...
If you want to know how powerfull each quad cpus is, why use very different memory settings to compare? If you want to compare full computers, that's another story but that's not the case here.
How is 299 $ reasonable price, and 235 $ not? I dont buy the "The Phenom X4 9850 is currently AMDs fastest shipping quad core CPU, but it's definitely a budget processor". Definitely a biased Pro-Intel review.