Higher Clock Speeds, No TLB Issues and Better Pricing: The New Phenom
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 27, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
The Test
| CPU: | AMD Phenom 9850 (2.5GHz) AMD Phenom 9750 (2.4GHz) AMD Phenom 9550 (2.2GHz) AMD Phenom 9600 (2.3GHz) AMD Phenom 9500 (2.2GHz) Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 (2.50GHz/1333MHz) Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2.40GHz/1066MHz) Intel Core 2 Duo E8200 (2.66GHz/1333MHz) Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 (2.66GHz/1333MHz) |
| Motherboard: | ASUS P5E3 Deluxe (X38) MSI K9A2 Platinum (790FX) |
| Chipset: | Intel X38 AMD 790FX |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 8.1.1.1010 (Intel) AMD Catalyst 8.3 |
| Hard Disk: | Western Digital Raptor 150GB |
| Memory: | Corsair XMS2 DDR2-800 4-4-4-12 (1GB x 2) Corsair XMS3 DDR3-1066 7-7-7-20 (1GB x 2) |
| Video Card: | eVGA GeForce 8800 GT SSC |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA ForceWare 169.25 |
| Desktop Resolution: | 1920 x 1200 |
| OS: | Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit |
Our Stance on Testing with the TLB Bug
The B2 stepping Phenoms suffer from the infamous TLB erratum which, if left unpatched, could potentially result in system instability or silent data corruption. Thus far AMD has only seen negative after effects from unpatched B2 processors in very isolated cases, described to AnandTech as the following:
1) Windows Vista 64-bit running SPEC CPU 2006
2) Xen Hypervisor running Windows XP and an unknown configuration of applications
While these are both isolated cases, they are by no means the only scenarios in which the TLB bug could rear its ugly head. All of the latest Socket-AM2+ motherboards have been updated to fix the TLB bug, at the expense of sometimes significant performance degradation. The table below summarizes our findings in our initial B3 stepping article:
| SYSMark 2007 | DivX | CineBench R10 | 3dsmax 9 | WinRAR | |
| AMD Phenom 9600 (B2 Stepping) - TLB Fix Disabled | 117 | 74.3 fps | 7396 | 7.20 | 1348 KB/s |
| AMD Phenom 9600 (B2 Stepping) - TLB Fix Enabled | 105 | 72.0 fps | 7031 | 6.47 | 367 KB/s |
| Performance Impact | -10.3% | -3.1% | -4.9% | -10.1% | -72.8% |
Since the bug could prove to be a problem in usage scenarios that haven't yet been discovered, we feel that it's best to test these B2 stepping chips with the TLB fix enabled (the default state on all motherboards now). Obviously this doesn't impact the new xx50 CPUs since they aren't plagued by the TLB erratum.
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Margalus - Thursday, March 27, 2008 - link
intel did not do "paper launch" of the wolfdale. They are just popular. If you can't find one, you aren't looking very hard. I've had an e8400 for over a month now, and have seen them in stock at multiple places since then.The Jedi - Monday, April 7, 2008 - link
Aside of the E8400 being faster than the E6850, they $#%@ed up the industry by pricing it considerably cheaper, creating massive demand, while being unprepared to fill that demand. The E8400 supplies dried up leading to scalping on eBay.Now supplies of the E8400 have returned and the price is around where it ought to be. Hopefully Intel will keep it together.
stinkyj - Thursday, March 27, 2008 - link
i see stock for 8400 too, but i see a wide variance in pricing. in stock == inflated price.sc3252 - Thursday, March 27, 2008 - link
Its nice to see some competition in the quad core arena. AMD isnt the fastest, but it does put out a competitive enough part for now. Hopefully in the next 3-4 months they will release faster cpu's to up the ante.mlau - Thursday, March 27, 2008 - link
The LDAP guys think the new Phenoms are quite impressive:http://connexitor.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=191">http://connexitor.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=191
They don't win against Intel on all irrelevant benchmarks (3dmark and
the other synthetic crap), but fare quite well in server workloads.