AMD Phenom 9500 processor
AMD's four-core desktop CPU squares up for a fight with Intel's Core 2 Quad
21st January 2008 15:04 GMT
A native quad-core design sounds as though it should be better than two dual-cores that have been cobbled together, but life isn’t necessarily that straightforward. Core 2 has all sorts of deficiencies, including the use of a frontside bus (FSB) and a memory controller that is part of the chipset. In a server, you can hit all sorts of bottlenecks in performance when you gang up a number of multi-core Xeons, but in the desktop arena these limitations don’t seem to have any effect.
All the details
Phenom uses an AM2+ socket which needs to be matched to an AM2+ motherboard if you want to get the benefits of Hyper Transport 3.0. We used an Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe with AMD's 790FX chipset for testing. We also threw an Athlon 64 X2 6400+ into the equation on a Gigabyte GA-MA69G-S3H motherboard, and then mixed and matched the permutations of AM2 processor with AM2+ motherboard (X2 on Asus) and AM2+ CPU on AM2 motherboard (Phenom on Gigabyte).
Asus' M3A32-MVP Deluxe: AM2+ socket on board
We also ran a Core 2 Q6600 on an MSI Diamond X38 with OCZ PC3-1333 memory so we could see how a comparable Intel system would perform.
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Intel Core i7 I7-920 Quad Core Processor (2.66GHz, 4x256kB, 4.8GT/s QPI, LGA 1336 Socket B)
AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition Quad Core Processor (3.4GHz, 6MB L3 Cache, 4x512KB L2 Cache, 2000 MHz Bus, Socket AM3)
Intel Core i5 750 Qaud Core Processor (2.66GHz, 8MB L3 Cache, 2.5 GT/s Bus, Socket H LGA1156)
Asus P7P55D Motherboard (Intel Socket H LGA1156, P55 Express, ATX, 16GB DDR3)
Asus M4A785TD-V EVO AMD 785G/SB710 Socket AM3 ATX Motherboard
