The November Phenom(enon) dissected

OUR TAIWANESE friends advise us of the impeding announcement of the first three AMD Phenom mainstream quad core CPUs: the 2.2GHz 9500, the 2.3GHz 9600, both 95W parts, and the 2.4GHz 9700, a 125W TDP bin. There's no mention of any PhenomFX high end thingies there yet, you'll notice.

These newbies all support the critical new features, like 3-level cache, HT 3.0, DDR2-1066 as well as superfine overclock tuning, core-by-core, through the AMD Overdrive applet.

In memory-only benchmarks, the new Phenoms will still score up to double the Sandra and Everest scores compared to non-overclocked midrange Yorkfields, but everything else, our sources say, will still be slightly faster on the Intel units.

That's why, for now, AMD is only comparing their newest CPUs against the age-old Intel Q6600 low-end 2.4 GHz Kentsfield, with more or less matched results - at least in the presentation they are supposed to show to the world one week from now.

Interestingly, you notice the 30 per cent TDP extra for just four per cent added clock speed when going from Phenom 9600 to the 9700, a TDP which sounds like the one for Intel's 3.2 GHz Harpetown Xeon! Does it mean AMD had to pump up the jam, i.e. factory-overclock to the limit at least on voltage, to get the 2.4 GHz bin? Don't expect that much of overclock margin in that case - only the best water cooling will do to come close to full 3GHz on all four cores. And even then, not on many parts. It would also explain the lack of even faster PhenomFX parts on these slides.

So, unlike the previous iterations where high-end, high-margin parts came out first, AMD will this time have to fight in the mainstream, where Intel's lower production costs mean that Phenom 9700 could face a similarly low-priced Yorkfield 9550, able to run far higher than its baseline 2.66 GHz, FSB1333 settings.

Now, without the 2.6 GHz 'big brother' Phenom FX around, the flagship Phenom 9700 will have to fight in the same around $ 300++ price bracket at low-end and some midrange Yorkfields; not exactly a massive profit earner like Intel's new high end entries at $ 1K price bracket, where most of the production is pre-sold to the likes of Apple, Dell, HP and Sun, not to mention "the little ones", enthusiast outfits like OCZ, BioHazard or Vadim, who solely rely on top-end parts for their living.

So, AMD is trying to push the "platform bundle" package: please buy a Phenom, plus a matching 790FX chipset mobo, plus two or three (or why not four?) HD3800 series GPUs, and AMD can finally make some money on the whole platform, comparable to what Intel makes just on their 45 nm CPU. This is why we need competition, folks - Intel is performing too well in the past 18 months, thanks partly to AMD too.

But yeah, 2.4 GHz Phenom 9700 still is a good value-for-money part - if you stick with AMD and have some good DDR2 DIMMs around, yet don't exactly need absolutely highest performance or overclocking, it is worth considering on an even footing against Intel's lower-end Yorkfields. So, AMD, please pump up the jam for real this time, we want to see the true performer, PhenomFX, soon! µ