AMD Phenom II X4 940 & 920: A True Return to Competition
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 8, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Phenom II's Secret, In Pictures
I can be verbose, I know, I'm sorry - I'm working on it. But on this page, I'll use pictures to illustrate my point. Here's the 65nm Phenom die:
I highlighted one of the four cores in blue. The bottom part of the highlighted core its its 512KB L2 cache. The areas in pink are the 2MB L3 cache that is shared by all four cores. Now look at Phenom II:
Again we've got one of the four cores highlighted blue. The L1 cache size and the core itself look very similar to the original Phenom, but note how the new die is much more rectangular. The pink area represents the Phenom II's 6MB L3 cache.
Just comparing the two die you can see that while the individual cores look similar, the amount of L3 cache has gone up considerably. Remember that Intel found with Nehalem that an 8MB L3 cache was the bare minimum, leaving 2MB per core. The original Phenom had 2MB to share amongst all four cores, which is hardly enough; Phenom II fixes that. With a 6MB L3 cache and 512KB L2 per core, Phenom II looks a lot more like Core i7 from a compute-to-cache ratio:
Nehalem's layout makes a little more sense, with each core butting up against the shared L3 cache, but the point is that in both Phenom II and Core i7, the L3 cache is around 1/3 of the total die. The original Phenom alloted only 1/6th of the die for its L3.
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rudolphna - Thursday, January 8, 2009 - link
Hey anand, do you think you could grill AMD and see if you can get out of them which chips will be made at the upcoming Malta, NY fab facility? Will it be PII or maybe bulldozer?mkruer - Thursday, January 8, 2009 - link
Anand, I do alot of paring and although the recovery rate is good, i would like to see the results for creating a par2 file.Natfly - Thursday, January 8, 2009 - link
I'm glad AMD is somewhat competitive in the quad core realm but I just cannot get over how blindingly fast the Core i7s are. It is incredible.I hope AMD can make it through, for consumer's (and my stock's) sake. This is a step in the right direction.
xusaphiss - Thursday, January 8, 2009 - link
Come on, guys! I like a competitive market as much as the next guy but AMD is a whole generation behind. They should have had these when the 45nm C2s came out!AMD is lapped!
It's time for them to die!
CPU standards will only go down if they actually resort to third-party distribution!
Their video cards are always run hotter than NVIDIA and just less stable and overclockable. The only way they was able to stay alive in the race was pitting two of their GPUs against one on one board. NVIDIA hasn't even begun using DDR5 yet!
Intel and NVIDIA is not really receiving competition from AMD. AMD is just lowering standards.
ThePooBurner - Saturday, January 10, 2009 - link
PLAYSTATION THREE is that you?aeternitas - Thursday, January 8, 2009 - link
We would not of had C2D for years, if not for AMD. Please sit down your logic is flawed.Kroneborge - Thursday, January 8, 2009 - link
Oh, let's hope AMD doesn't die. Or you can add a couple hundred on to the price of all your favorite Intel processors lol.Genx87 - Thursday, January 8, 2009 - link
This one is simply not going to cut the butter by the middle of 09. True they are cutting into the Core 2 Duo's performance advantage. It still for the most part falls short. And I didnt see this thing really challange the i7 which will be Intels flagship chip by the end of 09. I dont know about AMD's future chips. But the Phenom needs an arch replacement for AMD to compete with Intel.JakeAMD - Thursday, January 8, 2009 - link
I would suggest an amazing PC experience is about far more than benchmarks or the performance of one component. Some benchmarks today are at risk of losing relevance to real application performance. For example, performance on 3DMark Vantage scores don’t necessarily translate into a better gaming performance. Also, the CPU-only approach to video processing performance is now thoroughly outmoded, as that should be offloaded to the GPU. The Dragon platform technology is really within the budgets people are affording themselves today and we’re doing a better job of serving the real needs of the PC market today. So I would ask you – Is $1000 or more worth the performance difference?Genx87 - Friday, January 9, 2009 - link
I am looking at these gaming benchmarks which is the most intensive thing I do on my computer. My 180 dollar E8400 is cheaper and faster.On the server side the i7 looks more attractive for my virtualization and sql server upgrade project. Where $1000 is pennies on the dollar. Though when you factor in total system cost it is usually not even that much.
Anyways the i7 will come down in price over the course of 09 as a consumer friendly platform is released and the cost of DDR3 falls as production ramps. So it wont cost 1000 more for an i7 system for long. And I question whether an i7 system costs that much more now.