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
SYSMark 2007
Our journey starts with SYSMark 2007, the only all-encompassing performance suite in our review today. The idea here is simple: one benchmark to indicate the overall performance of your machine.
AMD hasn’t done too well under SYSMark 2007, especially with Phenom - it was just never competitive. There were even murmurs of AMD complaining about its poor performance under SYSMark 2007 not too long ago. The complaints never went anywhere because Phenom II addressed the shortcomings. SYSMark 2007 favors larger caches and the original Phenom left its cores cache-starved. With 1.5MB of L3 cache per core, Phenom II now offers the same performance as its closest cost competitors under SYSMark 2007.
The Phenom II X4 940 gets the exact same score as the Core 2 Quad Q9400. The Phenom II X4 920 equals the performance of the Q9300, which is actually a bit more expensive than AMD’s proposed price. If the two were competing against the Q9550 and Q9400, respectively, AMD would go back to trailing Penryn.
The older Phenom processors are mostly worthless here - Intel’s Core 2 Quad Q6600 outperforms the Phenom X4 9950 by 8%, and that’s with CnQ disabled. Turn on CnQ and the performance gap grows to a noticeable 25%. One of the biggest advantages of Phenom II is that you can have CnQ enabled without the painful performance impact.
It’s worth pointing out the sort of performance you can get out of a high frequency dual-core CPU here. The Core 2 Duo E8600 is a bit expensive for a dual-core, priced at $266, but it offers the same performance as the Core 2 Quad Q9650. The more affordable Core 2 Duo E8400 runs at 3.0GHz, priced at $166, and outperforms all sub-2.66GHz quad-core Core 2 chips. While a quad-core will last you longer, if you are a frequent upgrader it’s worth paying attention to the dual-core market. An E8400 today, followed by a mainstream Nehalem next year, could be your path to performance enlightenment.
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Spoelie - Thursday, January 8, 2009 - link
Only one little gripe: why was a mid-range motherboard used for the phenom while the intel processors got enthusiast versions?there IS a difference apparently: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/795/5/">http://www.legitreviews.com/article/795/5/
Not that it would change the conclusions.
melgross - Thursday, January 8, 2009 - link
"Not that it would change the conclusions. "You answered your question yourself.
duploxxx - Thursday, January 8, 2009 - link
Nice review, always my firts site to read for a review. A bit basic on oc potential but you hint there is more to come, lets hope we don't have to wait another month like we had to wait for the 790GX board reviews.I don't see why AMD launched the unicore @1.8ghz.
You are stating that it is because of yields, might be but shanghai launched @2.0-2.2. Phenom2 would scale a lot better performance wise against penryn with a 2,2GHZ NB speed. for sure on the BE part that is a real advantage against the q9400-Q9550
Is this to give the am3+ an additional performance gain when launched? Retail chips hit NB speeds of 2,4-2,6 easy, they also showed up to 3.5-3.6ghz oc on stock vcore, your oc gain was real low, perhaps you show in future oc review what phenom can actually do.
no overview of total system power consumption idle and load?
ssj4Gogeta - Thursday, January 8, 2009 - link
Since most of the people have Intel now, it'll take them only a processor upgrade if they decided to buy a better Intel processor. But if they choose to switch to AMD, they'll have to buy the mobo as well.So for *most* people, getting a Q9400 (or Q9550 if the prices drop) will cost around $270, while getting a Phenom II 940 will cost around $470. And since this is the case for the majority, I don't see Phenom II being price competitive at all.
RadnorHarkonnen - Thursday, January 8, 2009 - link
There are more people with AM2+ Motherboards than you can think of.They may not spew they writings on the forums or comment actively saying "I'm upgrading!!!".
Units shipped, i would say you r are really short sighted. And the AMD2/AMD3 compatibility is great.
KikassAssassin - Thursday, January 8, 2009 - link
Yeah, for people building new systems right now who don't want to spend the money on an expensive i7 mobo and DDR3, the Phenom II looks really nice. Intel probably isn't going to make any more LGA775 CPUs, whereas an AM2+ system might have more room for future upgrades with AM3 being backwards compatible.melgross - Thursday, January 8, 2009 - link
But if you do go the i7 route now, you won't have to upgrade for a longer time than if you go with Phenom 1. Overall costs over time will still be lower.melgross - Thursday, January 8, 2009 - link
Oops! meant Phenom 11, or course. Anyway, the higher performance vs the price is worthwhile for many people.plonk420 - Thursday, January 8, 2009 - link
ask Dark Shikari of x264 fame .. i'm sure he could tell you an approximation of Phenom's L3 cache latency... and possibly Phenom II latency soon.hameed - Thursday, January 8, 2009 - link
In the first table here http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...">http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?... the percentages are hard to understand since they need to be flipped (i7 is before Quad) and btw in Cinebench the Quad advantage is 12.8% not 4.8% and the CS4 percentages are also not accurate.