Phenom will ship during the second half of the year, following the launch of the AMD’s first quad-core Opteron server chip, codenamed Barcelona, which will compete with Intel’s Xeon.
Phenom’s release will trail that of Intel’s Core 2 Duo quad-core desktop chip by probably eight or nine months. But, according to AMD marketing manager for desktop CPUs David Schwarzbach, Intel took a shortcut on innovation.
AMD contends that Phenom will offer advanced performance because it was built on a quasi-new architecture that was designed for more than two cores, unlike Intel’s.
Intel took two dual cores and put it into one package and said let’s get it out now, he said. AMD is taking the time to innovate.
AMD’s new Stars processor architecture, however, was not built for multi-core from scratch: it uses existing sockets. They are backward compatible and support quad-core.
Still, Intel’s Core 2 Duo quad-core processor has two dual-cores on the same die, while AMD’s Stars architecture allows four separate cores on one die, which eliminates the front-side bus bottlenecks, according to Schwarzbach.
AMD isn’t yet disclosing any specifications of Phenom, so benchmarking is not yet available. Schwarzbach said a dual-core desktop version will also be released, sometime after the quad-core. The company also declined to comment on any plans for a notebook version of Phenom.
Even if Phenom lives up to its name and blows past Core 2 Duo performance, it likely won’t pull AMD from its financial hole. Last month, AMD posted a whopping $611m loss, on 7% lower revenues. The chipmaker suffered from pricing wars with Intel, as well as from competitive from Intel’s latest products.
Our View
While AMD said Phenom will be reasonably priced, it initially will likely only appeal to the relatively small market of enthusiasts, gamers and creative professionals. It will be beneficial only to enterprise users with major data-intensive multi-tasking requirements, including Web work.
For workers doing simpler tasks that require only one or two cores, the quad-core could even slow down them down. That’s because the quad-core has a huge L3 memory cache, which first collects large amounts of certain data, from basic Web downloads, for example, before doling it out to the various L1 and L2 RAM caches on the appropriate processor. This won’t mean slower performance; rather there won’t be a performance advantage to having the four cores.
Also, there is a dearth of enterprise quad-core software that can take advantage of the added silicon.
Phenom will be an important release, however, because it will push AMD’s existing dual-core products into the mainstream, where Microsoft’s Vista OS and certain digital entertainment is driving demand for two cores.
