![]() ![]() The Radeon HD 3870 was recently given a recommended award by us and AMD's OverDrive shows real potential as well, so it's not all doom and gloom for AMD.įinal ThoughtsThe bottom line is that AMD's Phenom processors are currently too expensive and don't perform well enough to offer serious competition for Intel's quad-core processors. Let's not forget the other aspects of the recent Spider launch though the 790FX/790X/770 chipsets are all very low power and generally great value, even if it does still have only the antiquated SB600. Since both mobile and HPC applications are considered the future and where the money will be, this could certainly end up being where most of their resources are heading. ![]() AMD (ATI) has fantastic power regulation technology, as demonstrated in its chipsets, graphics products and to some extent, its CPUs, and it's looking to bring all that to mobile devices as soon as possible. To make matters even worse, consider AMD's financial position - it'll never go out of business, but if it decides to concentrate on its strengths this could leave desktop users further out in the cold. ![]() What exacerbates these fears is the potential future niche market that Intel is creating for enthusiasts with Nehalem, and that the completely new execution architecture in Fusion is coming in 2009 at the earliest (we all know what AMD schedules are like). However, despite the fact we cannot recommend the Phenom to consumer users, without AMD competing in some form or other, our worst fear might be realised and we will have to pay through the nose for the high-end performance we all desire. A couple of Opterons strung together via HyperTransport is still the best way to do things in a multi-processor environment, but on the consumer side of things where programmes are still predominantly single threaded it looks particularly weak. Unfortunately, most HPC workstation users will be more interested in the latter, I fear. The Agena core makes great use of some high performance computing (HPC) applications but not others - video encoding like DivX or MPEG4-AVC work well, but 3D rendering however doesn't work quite as well. As consumers no matter how much we love blue, green or red, we absolutely need AMD to make a good product to keep prices reasonable. Why? Because Intel can: there is no competition coming from AMD above the Q6600 so you have to pay the premium. The problem is, and the thing that scares me is that the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 is a massive price jump. VAT) there's very little reason to buy a Phenom for a new system at the moment. Considering that the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 can be bought for around £160 (inc. Conclusions & ValueThe 2.2GHz Phenom 9500 is around £150-£160 (inc. ![]()
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