Extreme Computing with AMD Phenom

AMD has breaking performance charts and five star rating barriers with its new 780G budget chipset and 790FX Spider platform gaming chipset, exclusively made for AMD processors. With godly onboard graphics and its famed Hybrid Graphics mode, the 780G was set to rule. With the possibility that Nehalem may not have nVidia GPU SLi support, 790FX is possibly the only solution for performance seeking gamers, and it too has lived upto the performance seeker’s expectations. But… It has had the sad fate of not having a single AMD processor to match its & series Chipsets’ potential. Its all (hopefully) set to change now with these new AMD Phenom processors…

Phenom – The troubled one hoping to gain back the trust it lost

AMD Phenom was supposed to be AMD’s big hit. It was supposed to crumble opposition from Intel Core2 series hands down. But sadly that never happened. AMD not only was unable to gain the upper hand in mainstream and high end range CPUs, it also ended up loosing its much more secure and liked budget range spot to intel, because of Intel’s E2xx0 series. Unlike during the days of Athlon XP, when AMD was the perfect thing, being of a better performance as Intel at a lower price, but was ignored due to general public ignorance of AMD processors by many people, this time AMD had created lots of hype regarding Phenom. But unlike the days of Pentium D, when AMD was THE fastest CPU manufacturer and out-performed intel from every angle, Phenom failed. Miserably. It was not the Core2Quad killer. Core2Quad Q6600 was much more VFM and better performing than early phenoms. AMD was forced to release its CPUs at a much lower clockrate than originally planned due to a faulty B2 stepping. Profits were hard to come by since AMD had to sell the phenoms at a very low price to ensure customers.

AMD Phenom is no longer AMD Moron !

But now Phenom is fast catching up. Their issue with the buggy B2 stepping is solved with an enhanced B3 stepping and now amd is releasing higher clocked phenoms to combat intel CPUs. AMD is launching an innovative attack stratagy – release more cores than intel in a given price range. While synthetic benchmarks often tie some of the value to mainstream range phenoms, and sometimes phenom looses, it definitely scores more for multitasking and virtualisation thanks to its extra core or two. Its clock to clock performance might be lesser than intel, but performance has definitely improved.

Advantage Phenom – The Value King

AMD Phenom has become one of the most buyable processors for mainstream value PCs today. Combined with the 780G chipset motherboard, esp the cheap Gigabit 780G, you get a PC which can multitiask a lot, stay cool and green, have lots of expansion and input slots to keep things future proof, at the same time, ensure that future processors are usable, since AMD AM2+ socket can accept AM3 CPUs of the future.

Lets take a Core2Duo E7200 and compare it to a phenom X3 8450, which my friend Saurav Basu kindly dug up in the market for me and found its price to be an amazing 5.5K + Vat, ~= 6K in India. The penryn gives better performance per clock, agreed. The penryn gives better gaming performance, agreed. The penryn overclocks better, agreed. But do you get a better platform support ? Nope. For 4.5K, the max you get is a Biostar P35 which hardly has features of 780G like eSATA port, etc. Also, when you try to run virtual machines which are 64bit, you can do so only on phenom since E7200 lacks hardware virtualisation support. The extra core helps here too. For multitasking, phenom gives more juice since it has 3 cores. More parallel processing is possible. Finally, phenom’s 780G has an excellent onboard solution that totally pwns others in Hybrid Graphics mode. You can even use the rather OK onboard as it is, since it runs HD3200, an underclocked HD3450. But for Penryn, you need to buy an external card which is going to add to your budget. Lets say you DO buy an external card. Low end cheap ones include the ever popular HD3450. Now if you use this in penryn, I assure you that you would get only half the performance of phenom since phenom can run the dedicated card and the onboard card in hybrid graphics mode.

Then, lets go to Intel CPUs on the higher end, like E8400. This is intel’s big and strong flagship dual core (lets forget the pricey E8500). Compare this to an AMD Quad Core Phenom, and lots of arguements as above, plus more come into picture.

Its all about 780G

Well, this wonderful chipset makes all the difference. It supports many features due to which amd can’t help but become a better choice than Intel. It has godly onboard graphics. It has lots of expansion slots. It has 5 SATA II ports and eSATA port for ensuring that you can connect all the HDDs you ever bought. It has support for upto 12 USB ports. And it supports 2 FireWire ports. Enough to connect anything. It has support for AMD’s future next generation CPUs. It supports PCIe 2.0 16x. Can things get any better for a 4.5K Budget motherboard ?

CrossFire gets more value with 790FX

Take a look at AMD’s Flagship gaming platform, the “Spider” Platform 790FX chipset. This does not have (and doesn’t need either) any onboard graphics, but it has ATI CrossFire support, and with ATI cards becoming cheaper by day, and purchasing power increasing, this makes the perfect Gamer’s choice. Its also a beautiful overclocker.

To Conclude

AMD has once again redeemed itself. Lets prepare for an AMD future. Hopefully this would ensure that the computing world is not lopsided again towards intel.

So finally, what do YOU feel about AMD now ? Has it successfully redeemed itself ? Do you think AMD now poses a valid threat to Intel ? Do you think its the right time to start hoarding AMD processors ?

PS: This article is just in revision #2 stage. Its still waiting edits. So bear with the bad spelling and grammer for now.