Intressant Phenom review

AMD's Phenom Processor - Beyond Erratum 298

Vet inte om denna varit uppe på forumet tidigare men den gav en del intressant information, bl.a. slutledningen:

"What we did was to try to get an idea of where AMD’s Phenom CPU could be placed in the current CPU landscape. Initially, we didn’t have very high hopes, especially after reading some of the early reviews. Then we started digging and, to be sure, Phenom is not a diamond in the rough, but it turned out to be better than what we anticipated.

The 9600 Black Edition is most certainly the better choice, even though it caps out at about 2.6 GHz, the performance is identical to the Phenom 9900 and the power consumption and heat dissipation are considerably lower.

Arguably, there is that thing called legacy support and legacy applications are still prevailing in today’s computing environment. On the other hand, there are truly multithreaded applications and as it turned out, the more thread level parallelism is used in any application, the better fared the Phenom processor. There is a bit more to this. Multicore processing is fine and dandy as long as the access to the data is warranted. Otherwise, there is starvation of the cores. One way of dealing with this situation is the use of FBDIMMs and independent channels with full duplex configuration to allow independent access of data with simultaneous Reads and Writes on separate channels.

Another way to go, and probably a more elegant solution is the use of dual independent DRAM controllers in “unganged” mode. Naturally, there is a potential drawback in that the 128 bit “ÜberDIMM” as we have come to know most currently existing “dual channel” in “dynamic mode” solutions no longer exists. Realistically, however, this is not a problem at all and never has been because aside from doubling the data width on every access, this type of dual channel mode has never proven to add much in terms of performance.

What it boils down to is that there is a tremendous potential embedded in Phenom that does not come into play with the existing software infrastructure. Particularly single threaded games are a lost cause and unfortunately, this is still the standard of the industry. UnrealTournament3 in this respect is a milestone also for the gaming industry and there are other games to follow in the same footsteps that employ more artificial intelligence and PhysX effects, which will cause most dual core processors to choke. But then, there is also the problem of the GPU limitations. Well… as long as nVidia still has high end cards …. "