New spin on the silicon???
941 pins

-pWs-

Really bad situation for AMD/ATI....... hope they can correct the problem and introduce a working competitive native quad soon. Would be interesting to see the performance and features of phenom......

@-pWs-, still aiming for phenom?

This post has been edited by kmarc: Jan 11 2008, 10:22 AM

Yeah Phenom still in buggy..I wish to see the real native quad soon..

Sorry. Typo.

Probably no lor. Disappointed

-pWs-

dam... thats a huge letdown... oh well... i guess ill just stick with my F3 for the time being. If no improvement is made on the AMD part by 2-3 months to come, i will go for the intel.

I have to disagree. Consumers nowadays are doing the following things:

1. Video encoding - transcoding IPOD Video/Touch/iPhone, transcoding TVB dramas, PC to XBOX360 etc
2. Picture processing - there is a growing consumer base going forward to SLR photography, processing RAW using Adobe Photoshop and other consumer retail software
3. Home Video encoding - encoding/decoding recorded home video to DVD
4. New generation PC gaming - Crysis, etc

These are the applications that are multi-threaded SMP in nature. According to Techspot review of an Intel Q6600 G0 (http://www.techspot.com/review/36-intel-core2-quad-q6600/page6.html), on real world content creation applications, it has an average of 10-30% improvement (time savings and performance) over X6800. Thats close to 80% time improvement over any single core processors. So the only thing a consumer will not go for quad core is actually the price and not whether they can fully utilize a quad core processor. Dual cores are cheap as chips nowadays so again thats another sweet area to rake profits. Just look at the E-series and upcoming Celerons.

On other applications, you're right because current retail software are way behind in terms of SMP and will only be good on enterprise applications. But that trend will change very soon since Windows Vista is a platform for multi-core processing already. We can expect situation to improve. Right now buying a Quad Core is rather to secure the future. Its nice to know that there are more headrooms to discover when more software introduce SMP.

Now with regards to licensing, the licensing charges are per physical processors and not virtual processors like P4 HyperThreading and in this case of interest multi-core processors but with an exception (depending on individual policies); that per physical processor does not have more than 4 processing cores. That is one reason the industry is pushing multi-core products because you'll save a lot of value when it comes to this. Check out the following references:

http://www.vmware.com/download/eula/multicore.html
http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/highlights/multicore.mspx

I'm sure there are more software companies implementing the same licensing policy especially when Microsoft adopts this policy. I just hope you didn't fail your assignment and have included reasonable considerations for this point.

Now who say native quad-core processors will beat non-native quad-core processors? During the 2006, there has been numerous discussions that non-native multi core processors will have to depend on FSB to transfer information to each processor core. That was the Pentium D. Today, non-native quad-core is as good as native quad core. Ever heard of shared L2-cache? Thats how Core/Core2 processor architecture share information which releases a lot of overhead. The only exception is when 1 core of silicon A wants to share information with another core on silicon B on a quad core processor where it had to go through FSB.

Intel will not go native quad core is because the benefits are low at this point and the risks are very high. Yield problems is going to create havocs. One faulty core will jeopardize the whole 4 core silicon. Thats 100% lost per processor. A native quad core silicon die takes up a lot of space, thats up to 2 times any dual core silicons per silicon wafer. Imagine the loses at this point. AMD had to implement e-fuses for its faulty Phenom and introduce tri-core processors later in the future. Look at Sony's Cell processor development. It'll tell you a lot going that path of road.

By going non-native, Intel can maximize its yield and can make decision very late into the production stage whether to make a Core 2 Duo or a Core 2 Quad. That gives Intel a lot of flexibility in determining how many C2D or C2Q depending on their marketing strategy.

This post has been edited by davidmak: Jan 11 2008, 05:24 PM

seems to me that phenom's launch didnt affect intel's sales after all.
today there is no stock for Q6600 at Intel USA.

source: an insider...

Yeah, its really disappointing. I think AMD has been making strategic mistakes every step of the way. Seems like a perfect storm. The only reason Intel can be that strong is because of its manufacturing advantage it has over AMD. Thats a classic rule why strong companies with cash and manufacturing capability can outrun any competitive company and flood the market with competitive products.

AMD really woke up the sleeping giant. The element of surprise is lost and Intel shouldn't be asleep real soon until they get relaxed again.

i would say technical mistakes....

must be from all those gatal cannot wait 4 the Q9450 anymore causes the quad shortage just like the cooking oil shortage here recently

One bad spin = technical mistake.
One screwup after another = something wrong with management.

well at least the price for intel is still getting better and better, thus that's what AMD is good for at the moment. Also on multicore, there was once a test on Crysis's AI, and the less core the processor have, the stupider the AI becomes. GO search for it on youtube, it's hillarous to see the AI on a single core machine

Okie, price drop for Phenom 9500. Its very tempting, whose going for it? Priced less than RM700 now.

from what i see, K10 is a risky bet from AMD. They introduce native quad core architecture while having uncertainty of having benefits over non native quad core in real world application, they introduce the slow L3 cache which dramatically slow down the memory bandwidth even slower compare to K8 and hence overall performance was reduced, and K8/K10 benefit alot of having fast memory bandwidth(not the case for C2D).

AMD design of K10 is good, but they took a wrong direction of having those risky bets. IMO, if AMD can somehow fix its slow L3 cache and doubled the memory bandwidth compare to K8, im sure they can at least match intel's Core cpu.

sauce

lol @ the inquirer. The post are usually fanboyish

Barcelona B3 are just fine, these are from AMD. Barcelona B3

However, there will be delays for high speed Phenom. 2 Phenom Delay

wow, for real? 700rm?

Heaven price ! PC-Zone sell 9500 at RM680 !

Wah lan, serious price ler. Looks like a desperate rush to dump chips. Seriously speaking RM680 (if this price is accurate), this is cheap quad-core processing power ler. Never mind the performance issue unless it really cannot compete with an average Core 2 Duo like E4xxx or E6xxx.

This is really bad for AMD in terms of reputation. New year, new product already got problems. The worst thing is the problem was found late into the supply chain into the customer/retail distribution channel. Then decide to dump them at low cheap price. Good for consumers but never good for AMD.