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Posts Tagged ‘ phenom ’
AMD: losing the battle on all fronts
Tuesday, March 8th, 2011
Remember AMD Barcelona? Delayed and disappointing, the architecture behind AMD’s first Phenom chips finally turned up in November 2007, six months behind schedule, with performance that left us “a little underwhelmed” after months of anticipation – and that’s before it was compared against its Intel equivalents.
At the same time, Intel was preparing to release its Wolfdale-based Core 2 Duo processors, which appeared in January 2008 using the more efficient 45nm architecture – a key improvement over AMD’s 65nm chips. The result? Our review concluded that the new Core 2 Duo E8000-series “wipes the floor with the [older] E6000 series” and that Intel’s new processors were an “unqualified success”.
Fast forward three years, and the similarities are startling. (more…)
Tags: AMD, athlon, ati, graphics, Nvidia, phenom, processors, sandy bridge
Posted in: Hardware
Taking the hype out of Hyper-Threading
Sunday, May 9th, 2010
In my recent review of AMD’s six-core Phenom II X6 1090T processor, I noted that, although this CPU has the same number of physical cores as Intel’s Core i7-980X, Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology lets the Core i7 service twice as many concurrent threads.
This prompted one commenter (giving his name as Wilbert3) to raise an insightful point. Hyper-Threading is great for everyday multi-tasking: for example, it lets a dual-core Core i5 CPU service four concurrent processes. But it works by presenting each core’s spare execution capacity to the OS as a virtual second core. Under heavy load, where there is no spare capacity, it would seem unable to offer any benefit. In such cases we shouldn’t expect to see a Core i5 achieve performance anywhere near what a true quad-core architecture would provide.
That analysis sounds persuasive, but is it borne out by the evidence? (more…)
Tags: AMD, benchmarks, Core i5, Core i7, cores, cpu, HT, Hyper-Threading, intel, multi-tasking, parallel, parallelism, phenom, threads
Posted in: Hardware, View from the Labs
All the week’s reviews
Friday, January 16th, 2009
For those of you not swamped by tax return gubbins – we’ll shamelessly plug our ‘How to avoid tax return hell‘ feature at this point – it’s been a PC-centric week on reviews, but with some interesting variations on the usual black box design.
All-in-one PCs and Phenomenal CPUs
The Mesh Matrix II was a traditional PC, but inside sat one of AMD’s brand new Phenom II processors. We put it through its paces and it blew the old Phenoms away; it’s not up there with the recent Core i7s from Intel, but the price makes it a real competitor. The Mesh PC it came in was pretty special too, earning six stars out of six in our review. (more…)
AMD shuffles its feet
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008
Over breakfast this morning, I was chatting to Ian McNaughton, AMD’s robust senior product manager. Now, before tongues start wagging, I should explain that, right now, I, along with a few other members of the British technology press, am down in the south of France for a first look at a new AMD technology. (I can’t tell you about it just yet, but rest assured you’ll know the very second the embargo lifts.) Since this event has seen both journos and hosts tumbled together in the same hotel, it’s fairly inevitable we’ll bump into one another from time to time.
It’s not every day one gets to chat with senior AMD staff – especially not while they’re in such an agreeably bleary and docile state – so I took the opportunity to voice a personal opinion. I observed (perhaps a little bluntly) that it was all well and good AMD announcing new technologies for the future, but perhaps it ought also to think about promoting one of the strongest bits of technology it already has in the marketplace, viz. its Phenom X3 and X4 processors.
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