The Phenom Question

The CPU wars aren't over for the year, despite there being only 64 days left in the calendar. AMD is committed to releasing Phenom in 2007, and with it will come a definite change in the balance between AMD and Intel. No one is expecting AMD to take the overall performance crown away from Intel - AMD simply won't be able to hit the clock speeds necessary - but will it be any more competitive at mainstream price points?

When AMD's Barcelona launched we attempted to simulate desktop performance vs. its K8 architecture in a handful of applications; we came up with the following chart:

Using those numbers, we took our Athlon 64 X2 6000+ results and scaled them according to where we expect Phenom to perform. We then put this simulated Phenom head-to-head with an identically clocked Core 2 Duo E6850 as well as the price-competitor to the 6000+, the E6550.

Note that this is a very rough comparison, first because the scaling values we have were taken from a quad-core Barcelona vs. two dual-core K8s and we're applying it to a dual-core K8 here. Second, AMD isn't going to be launching a 3.0GHz dual-core Phenom until sometime next year - most likely after Intel has already started shipping mainstream Wolfdale parts - which means that AMD will be competing against a completely different beast when that happens. Regardless, the comparison is still an interesting one to make; let's see if we can get any sort of expectations for what is to come.

*Denotes time in seconds, lower bars mean better performance

Clock for clock, Intel still holds on to the lead, but note that there are some situations where our simulated 3.0GHz Phenom X2 outperforms the E6550, which could be its price competitor. Again, we're assuming that a dual-core desktop Phenom will scale as well as our quad-core Barcelona and we're also assuming that AMD can price Phenom this competitively and that Intel doesn't respond with even more aggressive pricing. That's a lot of assumptions for AMD to be able to pull ahead of Intel at the same price point, but then we need to factor in the other P: Penryn.

In a couple of the areas that will be close between AMD and Intel, such as DivX and 3dsmax, Penryn happens to do really well. That means any gains AMD could make there with Phenom may be negated by the performance boost we're seeing from Penryn, leaving us in much of the same situation that we are in today. The only saving grace for AMD is that there are some areas where Intel just doesn't get a big performance boost from Penryn (e.g. SYSMark, Lightwave), and in those benchmarks Phenom will make AMD more competitive.

The end result is that we expect Phenom to make AMD more competitive, but because of Penryn and aggressive pricing - and if our assumptions are correct - it doesn't look like we'll see the sort of upset that Intel pulled on AMD with the launch of the original Core 2. (Or that AMD pulled on Intel with K8 vs. NetBurst.)