AMD launches B3 PhenomsX3 and X4s, B2s and B3s, eight in allBy Charlie Demerjian: Thursday, 27 March 2008, 7:31 AMAMD IS RELEASING the long awaited 'B3' Phenoms today with no TLB bug. It may be a day late and a few hundred MHz short, but they are finally out. Whoopee!There are 8 new SKUs coming of various flavors, 3 and 4 core variants, and even some new B2 stepping parts. AMD wisely differentiated between B2 and B3 parts in the product name, B2s are 8x00 or 9x00, B3s end up with 8x50 or 9x50. Basically if it ends in 50, it is a new part. In the era of stupid and purposely confusing names, this is a ray of sunshine.The vital statsThe 9xxx series are all quad core parts, the 8xxx are tri-cores, and all but the 9100e and the 8xxx parts are B3 steppings. The 9100e and 8xxx parts are older B2s, but don't be surprised if they are phased out sooner rather than later as B3s take up more of the mix.The pricing puts them right on top of Intel quads, a few dollars cheaper making them a pretty damn good deal. The gaps in the pricing are because they are OEM only parts. Expect the 9650 to cost about what a 9600 does, the 8600, 8400 and 9100e to run about $175, $150 and $200 respectively.Coupled with a 780G mobo, a lower end X4 or an X3 would make a nearly unbeatable casual gaming box for $300 or less. If you look at things from a platform perspective, something that is basically impossible not to do anymore, AMD makes up for a lot of CPU weakness with chipset and GPU goodness.The news is not all that good though, starting with the wattage. If you look, the best that AMD can put out is a 95W 2.4GHz machine or a 125W 2.6. Lets hope for their sake that the early ramp of the B3 parts starts skewing toward higher clocks soon, 2.5GHz at 125W is not enough to make Intel notice, much less be afraid.While it isn't going to set the overclocking world aflame, not literally, the offerings do represent a solid mix for retail parts. More mainstream priced quads will do well at Best Buy and retail channels and the tri-cores do not have a counter from Intel, and won't for a long time.The X3 and X4s are bittersweet news. They should have been out in September, but they are finally here. With any luck, AMD can now put the last year behind them and move on. If nothing else, that is great news.
AMD releases three more three coresLike quad cores, but not as goodBy Charlie Demerjian: Wednesday, 23 April 2008, 7:45 AMAMD IS COMPLETING the recent rash of CPU releases today with the new -50 series triple cores. There are three models, the X3 8450, 8650 and 8750.If you remember back to the golden age of late March, AMD put out a ton of B2 and B3 stepping CPUs. The one thing missing from the mix was a B3 X3, and now we have 3 of them, all B3 X3s. Sorry, had to say that, but at least I didn't point out that there were 2 B2 X3s earlier. In any case, all are the same as the older models, just a newer stepping sans the way overblown TLB bug.The 8450 is a 2.1GHz model that retails for $145, the 8650 is 2.3GHz that costs $165 while the 8750 runs at 2.4GHz for $195. This last one undercuts it's X4 cousin by $20 MSRP and equals the cost of the 2.2 GHz 9550 X4. Given how few games use a third core much less a fourth, the X3 could be the better gaming option at the price point. All X3s are 95W parts.Not much else is new, just a B3 version of the parts that came out last month. While most may mock the whole concept, it gives AMD a weapon that Intel can not match in retail for at least another year, and that is worth quite a bit. You can construct a three core X3 system, 780G mobo, CPU and 2GB of RAM for well under $300 now, try that with a quad.Retail is all about giving the consumer options they didn't know they wanted, and the X3s do just that. Just like in fast food, the mere existence of a triple Whopper makes the double seem quite reasonable. AMD can push the idea of an X3 to people who don't want to spend the money for an X4, and Intel will have nothing to aim at them. If you look at the mouth-breathing, knuckle dragging retail PC buyer, they will go for this logic, never mind that they don't need a second core to begin with.If you are wondering how they work, the short answer is just fine. I received an X3 8750 from AMD the other day, and it plugged into my 780G and 790G mobos just fine. Switching between it and an X4 9850 worked as expected, but going back and forth from a B2 stepping 9600 made the BIOS flag a new CPU. That was the worst of the compatibility issues encountered.In testing, we took the aforementioned X3 8750 and two X4s, a 9850 and an early engineering sample 9600, and set them all to 2.4GHz@1.2v. The testing rig was an Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe with 2G of Corsair Dominator DDR2-800 running at 5-5-5-15, an OCZ Vanquisher fan, Western Digital 500GB RE2 HD and a PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750 PSU. Two ATI 3870 GPUs were added on in Crossfire mode hooked to a Dell 3008 30" monitor.In the time honoured tradition of simply mucking around with the new toy, there was a lot of nothing that happened. The 8750 X3 played all the games I am currently hooked on, Supreme Commander, Dawn of War: Dark Crusade and Portal without a hitch, there was no noticeable differences between the three CPUs to the semi-trained eye.In a slightly more instrumented test, some differences were measured. Please remember, all CPUs were set to the same 2.4GHz and all voltages were set at 1.2v just to even things out. At idle, the 8750 sucked 178W, most of that from the GPUs. The 9850@2.4/1.2 took 189W and the 9600 sipped 172W at the same settings.In 3DMark06 at default settings, the CPUs scored 12169, 12977 and 12898 for the 8750, 9850 and 9600 respectively. They drew 347, 359 and 341W while doing so. With the Valve Map Compilation benckmark, the CPUs took 208, 229 and 210W respectively and turned in times of 3:59, 3:05 and 3:07 minutes.Given that only one of these is stock, I would caution against drawing any firm conclusions. The X3 performs just about where it should, almost exactly 33% slower than the X4s in CPU intensive tasks, and notably below the X4s in 3DMark. It is just about what you should expect.In the end, the biggest thing that the X3 line will give AMD is competitive differentiation at retail. There will be a smooth ramp in speed and pricing between 2, 3 and 4 cores, something that all stores like to see. I would be surprised if it doesn't sell quite well, it is reasonably priced and quite a unique part.
AMD bangs virtual green drumReplaces 135 servers with just seven, thanks to VMwareBy Paul Hales: Friday, 27 June 2008, 3:36 PMAMD ONCE HAD 135 servers crunching data for its Austin Texas HQ. Now, having virtualised the lot using VMware's virtualisation software it has cut that number to just seven. The move resulted in 79 per cent power savings, Margaret Lewis, AMD director of commercial solutions and software strategy told the INQ this week.Isn't virtualisation bad news for a chip maker? we wondered. If seven servers can do the same job as 135 did before, doesn't that mean you'll sell fewer chips? Lewis claimed that the move means that firms that virtualise will be able to deploy the spare capacity to do other things. We were unable to pin down what these might be, however.AMD reckons its multi-cored Opteronic architecture is the best choice for virtualised environments because virtualisation is memory intensive. AMD's Direct Connect architecture allows all CPUs to access all memory blocks in the system, so it is much more flexible than "other" architectures, Lewis claimed.The firm is plugging its virtualisation prowess. Lewis said its new Rapid Virtualisation Indexing technology means much of the memory handling in a virtualised environment becomes a hardware function, lessening reliance on software for complex memory handling.Lewis wouldn't be drawn on which software virtualiser virtualises the best, but delivered a long list of companies with which AMD had worked to optimise Opteron's virtual credentials. Last of these was Microsoft, and Lewis did look a bit sheepish when delivering the M-word, but that may have been because of some perception that we're open sauce evangelists here at the INQ. But we did happen to notice that when four-core Barcelona was finally delivered it came with an ad. campaign sponsored by Microsoft, which is playing virtual catch-up with year. Indeed, no sooner had we left Lewis's warm presence than Microsoft had delivered its Hyper-V-ole software. Hmm. There may be a perception that Microsoft will take over the whole virtualisation world, but that's not going to happen, said Lewis. But it will certainly have a go.Along with any discussion of virtualisation comes a discussion of that oxymoron, Green IT. Lewis is shrewd enough not to tell the INQ that AMD is concerned with saving the planet. What she does claim is that the firm lucked out because it was concerned with delivering lower-power server chips some time before the IT world went green propaganda bonkers. Green talk has taken off big time over the past two and a half years, she says. Luckily AMD was bragging about delivering future Opterons in the same power envelope back in April 2003 - when it, "wasn't trendy to be green."The storm came, she said, when energy prices shot up.Economics is all about of scarcity. No firm is going to go "green" unless it saves or makes (through good PR) money. But when the costs of powering and cooling a server farm or data centre shoot through the roof, that's when more efficient chips and software solutions become flavour of the month. Luckily for AMD, the economics of scarcity mean energy prices are never going to go down again."Green also stands for efficiency, said Lewis. "Performance comes at a price and today customers are less concerned with raw performance, they now ask how much it costs. (...) This comes along with the realisation that we may be harming ourselves if we don't actually go green. "
Phenom II available ‘fore YuleThe real thingBy Paul TaylorFriday, 5 December 2008, 18:10DISTRIBUTORS IN EUROPE and North America will begin shipping both OEM and retail boxes of the Phenom II 920 and Phenom II 940 starting December 18th (Europe), according to one distributor, and December 20th (North America).The Phenom II X4 920 SKU will sell at about $235 to retailers, while the overclocking whiz-kid, the Phenom II X4 940 will ship at $275. At least one distributor says December 20th is the ETA for the shipment.As far as we can tell, pricing in Europe will be around €220 for the 920 but will become available from the 18th. We couldn't get a pricing on the 940, though, but we'd expect it to be in the €250-265 range. Add tax to these numbers, if you will.This puts the Phenom II X4 940 just under the Core 2 Quad 9550, while the Phenom II X4 920 will undercut the Q9400. Expect Intel to slash prices just before Christmas.So those of you who wrote letters to Saint Nick asking for Phenom II, might get your wishes after all.We couldn't get hold of AMD for a comment, but there isn't much to comment, is there? Wonder how that January 8 NDA will hold up when these things reach the market?
DDR3-based Phenom II gets a showingNew maths: 910 trumps 940By Paul TaylorTuesday, 27 January 2009, 10:50THE CHAPS at Tom's Hardware store in Taiwan managed to grab some early Phenom II X4 910 benchmark numbers and performed some synthetic tests showing DDR3 performance levels.The X4 910 (quad-core 2.6GHz 2MB L2, 6MB L3) is the first Phenom II to be spotted with an integrated DDR3-1333 controller – current Phenom II X4 sport the DDR2-1066 mem controller – and it appears that performance seems to scale well with the added memory bandwidth. The THG Taiwan preview shows some very interesting scores in PC Mark that smash the Phenom II X4 940 and 920 memory Marks to bits, something that's to be expected from DDR3 vs DDR2, of course.The team also managed to show off the processor's overclocking ability taking it all the way to 3.5GHz (that's a 900MHz overclock), at the same time overclocking memory to DDR3-1600 speeds. The performance jump was almost linear.The Phenom II X4 910 is expected to be the 'slowest' Phenom II X4 in AMD's portfolio, which of course is good publicity for AMD, but bad for business, as this processor is exceeding the current high-end 940's performance. Knowing DDR3 offers such a jump in system scores, users may shy away from their current 940 and 920 editions.On the other hand, buying a current 940 will still offer good performance without having to upgrade your platform.Despite plans to lower production, Deneb-based Phenom II X4 processors with AM3 packaging are on schedule to hit shop shelves this coming month.
You and Crixx fighting for the title of 'taking longest to upgrade'. lolKeep waiting.
