Hmm... Agena X2 has a real chance of stealing the new consumer crown.
*Should* be better performing clock by clock (As I suspected), and it even reaches 2.8Ghz at first stepping. Nice...


X4 is not shabby at all. Thermal ratings for 2-2.2 should be wee bit higher than 65W, and 2.4 shouldn't jump to extremely close to 89 yet.

Even if HTT doesn't help, floating point performance on the Phenoms are going to be err... phenomenal?

Integer I don't know but engineers hint to parring C2D on integer @ same clock speed.

To top on to what kmarc said, that also explains why Barcelona (Not Agena, the consumer Phenom) has 3 HTT links and is currently clocked lower (big guess that it's on HTT speeds!)

And with HT3 AMD might want/IMHO should get into 16 socketed servers.
The only other CPUs in this segment suck (Pentium 4 Xeons lolol)


On HTX I'm not so sure, current boards do not have any of that and peripherals are developed exclusively to popular industry standards. PhysX can already run on PCI and to use HTX implementation would have to be more complex (you'd have to redo quite a lot on the chip)

I seriously doubt anyone here would get a Phenom at launch.

LYN members do have a stronger Int/nV bias and little guts (unless it's reviewed, don't buy)

I'm not condoning this kind of blind-faith buying, but you'll never get rid of first time impression bias- most people still have higher regards for Intel than AMD, nVidia than ATi, see how P35 sold.

There should be at least a few people with big wallets who would snatch Yorkfield along with X38 up quickly for testing/general use when it comes out, but RD790 and Agena?


Still, it DOES matter that AMD isn't instilling confidence in us by taping out all sources of benches until near/post-launch, but they've never been good at organizing media/press hype (one of the places where Intel wins by much)

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Added on September 7, 2007, 8:47 pmUnless someone overclocks it to 3.4 (max speed on B2) on air.

This post has been edited by X.E.D: Sep 7 2007, 08:47 PM

Nah, I believe someone here got it right:



It applied during the Athlon/P3 days, BUT the Athlon did NOT smoke the PIII like everyone's memory tend to do so.
It was on par, until AMD got to 1Ghz official first and Intel was slow with Coppermine, Netburst sucked ass and AMD had common sense to make Thoroughbred a reality- and THAT smoked P4.
Even in that case people tended to buy the Pentium III just because it's Intel, and secondly because nobody major in the business were selling Athlons. No "issues" whatsoever.


The X2s issues were corrected by installing a driver that all games had issues on fixed, and pretty much thanks to the IMC the X2 doesn't need memory to run at fast specs, instead with as less latency as possible. (MUCH more latency-sensitive)
It's in the design, and keep note that the X2s were actually supposed to run on DDR1 originally- until the Intel/OEM brute-force came along.

This post has been edited by X.E.D: Sep 8 2007, 06:28 PM

At least wait for the Phenom. Or even, 2008 might be a better time to buy.
People will have lots of excuses on higher clocks from Intel and whatsoever, but that is just repeating what K8/Athlon 64 had been "cursed" with- and they ramped up quickly.

2008 is the real battlefield, 07 is practically useless- just Tigerton 65nm vs Barcelona.

Agena X2 is actually called Kuma, and they're both codenames.
Phenom X4-> Agena
Phenom X2-> Kuma

Kuma should be quite good versus the Agena, as AMD can definitely clock these babies a LOT more faster than their big brothers. I expect 3.0Ghz quite soon (08 of course) to pacify the E6850, or whatever will be for Penryn.

"Since the L3 cache is clocked at the same speed as the memory controller, raising that memory controller's clock speed should be a priority for AMD. This particular issue may be more of a concern in desktops and workstations than in servers, however, given the usage models involved."

Aah... that kinda explains why it's scaling so well to 2.5.
OR- why 2.0 is so handicapped.

Totally depending on your perspective.

Not all reviews paint the same picture.

http://www.techwarelabs.com/reviews/proces...ona/index.shtml
Inconclusive but a different way of comparison lol.

And benchmarking on a beta BIOS (all reviews) = WTF.

The Sep 10 CPUs are "BA" or "B1 Fixed", whichever way you like them.

NOT those lame crippled ones from the Coolaler review.

Though I agree with B2 bringing a shinier outlook and propose that B3 saving their asses from eternal damnation (it's all in the yields).

Err... the 2.5Ghz was B1.

B1 is the reason why they did NOT start selling it at 2.5ghz.

I think it wasn't a real chip destined for production though.

Some vendors got 2.5 unreleased Opterons (99% B2), Anand o/ced their 2.0s.
DAAMIT most probably ended up with a rough spin but met urge to sell the chip immediately.