The Cheap Hot Box of 2009: Do You Want It?

September 2, 2008 Ed Stroligo Uncategorized 0

Are you still interested in lower-performance but cheap hotrod boxes?

Look here, and here and you’ll see AMD’s roadmap for the first half of 2009 and some comments about it.

It shows Denebs popping up at the beginning of the year, but it also shows “Propus” and “Rana” cores popping up around March.  Propus and Rana chips will be quad and tricore chips without the substantial L3 cache that their big brothers Deneb and Heka will have.   This ought to make them pretty small compared to their big brothers (and Intel chips), and pretty cheap to both make and sell.  Essentially, they’re multicore Semprons.

I’m sure they’ll be big in plain vanilla OEM boxes, and it’s very easy to see cheap boxes being put together with these chips and a lot of cheap DDR2 RAM.  They won’t perform anything like Bloomfields, but the price will probably be only a fraction of Bloomfield systems, and rather cheaper than Penryn systems.  The lack of L3 cache will hurt performance, but if the past indicates the future, the hit will probably be only 5-10%.

Then again, when the Semprons came out, we and a few others thought they’d spawn a generation of cheap hotrods like the long-gone but still remembered Celerons, but that never really happened.

I understand it’s tough to ask people whether or not they’d buy a system when they don’t know how well it will perform and how much it will cost, but assume for argument’s sake that it will do somewhat but not a lot better overclocked than current overclocked Phenom systems and cost a bit less.  Would this be something that would seriously interest you, or would you stick with Intel until the AMD chips get more competitive, or go with the big brother AMD chips instead.

This isn’t a poll or anything, but I’d like to get a little feedback on this.

You know where to find me. 

Ed

About Ed Stroligo 95 Articles
Ed Stroligo was one of the founders of Overclockers.com in 1998. He wrote hundreds of editorials analyzing the tech industry and computer hardware. After 10+ years of contributing, Ed retired from writing in 2009.

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AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition

August 17, 2009 Joe Citarella News, Processors 0

Seems to me there’s been a lot of hyper-ventilating about AMD’s Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition with some implying it’s an overclocker’s dream. My friends at XBit Labs have taken a close look at what’s possible (HERE) and concluded:

“…[The] new Phenom II X4 965 working at 3.4 GHz frequency is pretty much as fast as Core 2 Quad Q9550 at 2.83 GHz nominal speed and fall behind Core i7-920 with even lower nominal frequency of 2.66 GHz. So, AMD CPUs lose to Intel competitors quite significantly in IPC (instructions per clock). It is this particular fact, but not the insufficiently high clock speeds, that do not allow AMD solutions to find their way into the high-end price segments.

Moreover, considering that Phenom II X4 965 has increased to 140 W typical heat dissipation, its launch seems even more to be the “last resort”. We obviously shouldn’t expect Phenom II X4 processor family to speed up any further, at least until new Deneb core stepping comes out (which we have no information of so far). So, Phenom II X4 965 will most likely remain the fastest quad-core AMD processor for a while. And within this period of time Intel may not only expand their Lynnfield processor family, but also start production of 32 nm technologies. In other words, while today we reviewed Phenom II X4 965 as a mainstream solution, in the near future Phenom II X4 processor family will have be just a low-cost quad-core offering, like first generation Phenom X4 CPUs.”

Sounds like too little, too late.

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