AMD Phenom X4 9850 on the introduction

AMD Phenom X4 9850 on the introduction

Is this AMD’s swan song?

AMD are the underdog, they accept been the underdog and for the accountable approaching they will abide to be the underdog. They accept just recorded their fifth division banking accident and assume to be floundering lately.

The a lot of contempo pitfall that AMD has suffered came in the anatomy of the abominable TLB errata which saw alternation at top amount levels, this was about adapted application motherboard BIOS updates but this ‘quick fix’ resulted in a 10% achievement decrease. AMD gave the user the advantage to either accredit the fix in the BIOS and accretion adherence but lose performance, or accumulate the achievement but lose stability. Thankfully the TLB absurdity was bound to the B2 dispatch of the Phenom range, AMD apparent this botheration and alien it in the 83 dispatch afterlight of the Phenom. All Phenom chips based on the new 63 dispatch accept a 50 at the end of their nomenclature, such as the Phenom X4 9850. The new numbers acquiesce you to accomplish abiding you are accepting the new afterlight dent and not one of the old ashamed chips.

The AMD Phenom is the latest dent alternation to appear from the underdog dent giant. Touted as getting the alone accurate cloister amount on the desktop market, the Phenom alternation of chips is accordingly something of a activity bulk for AMD, who are in fact drowning beneath the arduous massive bazaar allotment that Intel has managed to yield aback over the endure 3 years. The Phenom ambit did blunder a bit in the alpha with the abominable TLB errata, but they accept appear out with accoutrements reloaded and accessible to blaze.

The AMD Phenom ambit is based on AMD's 65nm architecture, abounding would criticize that this is already a bearing abaft Intel's 45nm architecture, but this hasn't chock-full AMD from accomplishment advanced and developing the Phenom range. The AMD Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition is an absorbing dent (for AMD standards); with a alarm acceleration of 2.5GHz, 512KB L2 Accumulation and 2MB L3 Cache. It's based on a 65nm AM2+ design, and it's a 63 afterlight chip. The architectonics is based on the revised 65nm accomplishment action employing the already declared 83 revision. To analysis this dent to its banned we acclimated the anytime accepted MSI KgA2 Platinum vl.O (BIOS vl.4). This lath is based on the AMD 790FX (ATI RD790) chipset and let us just say that we were absolutely afflicted with the specs of the lath in affiliation to its price.

We got our accompany to adapt us some OCZ Reaper HPC DDR2 1066 memory, and MSI afresh pulled through with a MSI 3870X2 to annular off this admirable package. So we had a rig to yield this dent to the sky and back, so we lit the agglutinate and watched this bad boy soar.

From the after-effects at banal alarm speeds the Phenom is on a par to the Intel Q6600, and with the Q6600 getting a few hundred bucks cheaper it becomes harder to altercate for the 9850. Now in the accomplished the Athlon 64 was the overclocking king, but again afterwards Intel accomplished the Netburst abortion and appear the Amount architecture, and chips such as the Intel Amount 2 Duo E6300 anon were demography the crown, chips that were cheap, able and able to adeptness speeds far college than the banal alarm speeds. Intel is cardinal the overclocking roost, period.

So can AMD in fact accomplish adjoin this giant, a abbreviate acknowledgment is no. Since the AMD Phenom X4 9850 is AMD's top desktop processor it should in fact be aimed at Intel's top chips, but acutely it doesn't. The 9850 fails on so abounding levels it's harder to about-face a dark eye. While a 500MHz overclock from 2.5GHz up to 3GHz can accord a appealing absorbing achievement access it fails to analyze to the overclocking adeptness of Intel's 65nm and 45nm chips. We approved to advance it above 3GHz and managed 3/lGHz but we alone managed to get a individual Super Pi 1M run afore we had dejected screens, the Super Pi account we got was 26.89s. Unfortunately even afterwards blame the voltage up to over 1.5v we still couldn't get the dent to be connected abundant for a 3D Mark run.

The Phenom X4 9850 has alone 4Mb L.3 accumulation analyze to the 6Mb that accompanies the new Intel Penryn. The alone aspect that keeps AMD advanced of Intel is their on-die anamnesis ambassador which acclimated to be AMDs defining featureScience Articles, but Intel are traveling to be introducing their own on-die anamnesis ambassador with the new Nehalem chip.