AMD Phenom with B3 Stepping

If you read articles regarding AMD Phenom lately, you will notice that they are still in trouble, until not too long ago. In fact, they have lost the crown of championship of watts to performance to Intel's Core chips. No offence but that is old technology from the Pentium M with shorter pipelines and increased L2 cache size. However, with the Core having some good reviews from leading websites like Anandtech and Tomshardware, I think it is really hard for AMD to strike back.

Look at Intel, they do have Core, then Core2 Duo and now quad core. Can AMD fight back?

Initially, Intel released thir quad core chip which is actually based on two combined Core 2 chips. That would make quad core and it is selling like hot cakes now (especially the Q6600 which is selling for around £150 - Bear in mind that the Q6600 is using the good old 60nm with 8MB L2 cache compared to the Q6700 which is manufactured using 45nm wafer and it comes with 12MB of L2 cache).

What about AMD then? Initially they came out with AMD Phenom which is true quad core (not a combination of two duo cores) and later with AMD Phenom Tri Core. Overall, they only have four Quad cores Phenom at the moment (Phenom 9500, 9600, 9600 Black Edition and now, the 9000). Phenom 9500 was rleased on 19 November 2007 and it was seen as a comback kid for AMD to overthrow Intel. However, reviews have mentioned that the 9500 is not easily available and it is only running at a stock speed of 2.3 Ghz. It has four independent 512kb of L2 cache and a 2MB of L3 cache. Impressive? It is good as the hypertransport is updated to 3.0 to accomodate more data flow but it has only 2MB of total L2 cache and only 2MB of L3 cache. Well, it is still better than Intel because their quad core does not have L3 cache!

Oh well, the AMD Phenom 9500 was relatively cheaper than Intel's Q6600 but the performance is not so good. It falls behind Intel's Quad core chips badly. Then they came out with the 9600 which is only 100mhz more than the 9500 at 2.3Ghz and finally the 9600 Black Edition. The Black Edition of the 9600 has an unlocked multiplier but as Tomshardware gathered, you can't really go far with it because you can only touch around 2.9Ghz with air cooling. All three chips have a well known TLB bug in them because all these were based on a B2 design which might cause software problems and it will eventually cause the pc to hang and so on. Bear in mind that with BIOS enhancement to correct the TLB bug was alright but it will sacrifice speed.

Now comes the best part. AMD have released the new Phenom 9000 (on 65nm wafer, 2.4Ghz, 2MB L2 cache and 2MB L3 cache) with B3 stepping which is supposed to be clear of the TLB bug which will cause a problem in the L3 cache. The new chip is stable and does not have any problem as reported after extensive reseach. Oh well, I think AMD have done it again! Perhaps AMD can now produce a better quad core than Intel. I think AMD can be much better if they release their product much faster. Good work to them and keep it up!!!