- Saturday, 4 July 2009
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We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out - Decca rejects The Beatles
Phenom II, Athlon X4, oh my…
LAST THURSDAY AMD announced plans for the forthcoming year of 2009. This included the launch of the Shanghai-based Opterons, Deneb-based Phenom IIs, mainstream Athlons based on Propus, Rana and Regor cores and the anticipated netbook CPU Conesus (brand name to be confirmed).
The really good stuff AMD didn’t give up at a simple show of the analyst crowd. You had to woo and court the evasive company, take it for dinner and a movie… or do what IT168.com did, and get an insider to give up the goods before you get past the Maitre D’.
So, dear readers, put on your geek goggles and get ready for AMD’s desktop plan, a brand for every codename.
On January 8th, the fanboi collective will whip out their credit cards and pay tribute to the almighty Phenom II X4 940 – a 3GHz Deneb with 4x512KB L2 cache, 6MB of L3 cache and – targeting you-know-who with its unlocked cores. It’ll be an AM2+ part and will require a whole lot of cooling but AMD is promising 4GHz on air, upwards on liquids. The multiplier-locked Phenom II X4 920 will also launch, but clocking in at 2.8GHz.These will be the first - and only - AM2+ 900-series Phenom II parts, according to the data.
The following month – February - AMD will proceed to setup the Phenom II for the remainder of 2009. This will imply the AM3 repack and a decent drop in TDP, blasting open the damn that holds back the remainder of the 900-, 800- and 700-series. Together with the new 790FX and 790GX + SB750, these will be part of the Dragon desktop platform.
Come April, the stalwart defender of AMD’s virtue – the Athlon – gets itself shoved into quad- and tri-coreness through the introduction of the Propus and Rana L3-less cores. Regor, the dual-core Athlon will only see the light of day in June/July according to the slideware. However, it will immediately clock at 3GHz and 2.9GHz, which might provide some more muscle to drive the dual-core mainstream market.
Here, we get the nagging feeling, that AMD doesn’t want to label Athlon as a Phenom backup-brand. Someone is still pushing Athlon hard, from within AMD. Note that the initial speeds on the Athlon X4 max-out at 2.7GHz, possibly to avoid any price/performance friction with its Phenom II brothers when it actually goes on sale.
You can look at it this way... roughly 4 months from now, AMD will have turned out a cheaper quad-core that will match today’s Phenom X4 9950 in performance.
We tried to make heads from tails with the data and this is what we got:
We've only included the really new stuff in this table, of course. Agena Phenoms and 5xxx, 6xxx & 7xxx series Athlons will continue to thrive on the bottom end of the AMD CPU charts, as part of the Elements plan.
As we said before, this finally looks like a plan, which is a whole lot more than what was around a few months ago. It doesn’t mean Intel is feeling threatened by all this, no sirree, but it does give something AMD will need going into the New Year: a bit of confidence from its partners.
2009 might not be a one horse race, after all. µ
L'Inq
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I built myself a budget gaming maching 18 months ago using an AM2+ motherboard, 4GB 1066 DDR2 and a Athlon 5000. Popping in a Phenom II X4 940 should keep me happy for a couple more years. Was just considering rebuilding an Intel based machine but I think that thought is on hold now. This is really good news for us that already have AM2+ motherboards...very easy/cheap upgrade path.
Intel will just lower their prices.
Is another year of crappy sub-par CPUs. At least they got their ageing atherlon64 based quad upto 3Ghz, shame its only carrying 8MB cache.

Maybe I can use it in my router?
So...
Phenom wasn't all that phenomenal?
Phenom II might aswell be called Oximoron, but hey - up is down, wrong is wright and war is peace, right?
This seems weird as we see a 3GHz of Deneb launching on January with support for DDR2 only and then later on we don't see anything clocked any higher or at the same speed and no AM3 unlocked Phenom II!!!
AMD is waiting what Intel will do before announcing more high-end parts.
It would be really great if there was an Athlon X4 upgrade path for my 65watt Board, but unless I'm missing something, that just won't be happening. At best, I can hope for current 65watt Athlon 64X2s to drop in price at least by January. At worst, no upgrade path beyond that. My next PC will likely be Intel, unfortunately, unless AMD provides a compelling reason to remain with them.....
I believe some of your posted wattage for the cpus are a bit off. 

Phenom 
I agree with the 2.9 and 3.0 ghz ones but for the rest it should be way lower than 95 watts. Since the cpus are based off shanghai server cpus and the top-most cpu running at 2.7ghz is at 75 watts and the ones below it run at 65 watts or less then shouldn't that mean the same for the phenoms? Also its way redicules to put the tri-core ones at 95 watts because they would run with way less watts simular to the ones out there now.
Interesting use of language, I notice that no-one has noticed it. Damn that dam!
Im just continue to wonder why the Intel ignorants continue to doom say AMD. If intel could just simply lower their prices and POOF AMD is gone then it would have happened years ago. The reason AMD is still competing and will continue to do so is because they produce higher yeilds of chips and thus can out price. Intels Core i7 wont be cheap as chips over night. Its gonna take a while for intel to get their yeilds up on this cpu as its incorperating alot of new tech that AMD have had a number of years to work out how to mass produce cheaply.

After you see the benches on the new Shanghai its pretty certain AMD is going to compete very well or even corner the Price / Performance market for 2009.

Core i7 will be faster but its going to be $$$!
I am amazed by the morons who don't seem to care if AMD goes under. We will all suffer immensely if we end up with only Intel as our CPU supplier.
I for one am happy to see some of the newer processors still able to run on an AM2+ motherboard. For those of us still trying to squeeze the most out of our aging AM2+ builds, the Phenom 940 looks like the way to go if you're not afraid of a little tweaking.
Intel fans, such as shakey, damage, and zgreen, might as face the truth. They wouldn't buy AMD no matter what, and would buy Intel even if their product is inferior, like they probably thought the Pentium 4 was superior and not sub par to the Athlon 64.
"up is down, wrong is wright and war is peace, right?"
That's Right. And the Pentium 4 is better than the Athlon 64 and Intel isn't a trade criminal either. That question coming from an Intel fan who probably also thinks bribing suppliers to not carry the competitions products is ok too. So apparently zgreen must believe all of that. That up is down, wrong is wright and war is peace.
The Phenom was phenominal. It was the first main stream CPU that had single die quad CPUs, instead of the fake dual dual core by Intel, and first to integrate the memory controller on the CPU, years behind AMD.