Conclusion
Despite AMD’s efforts, the Phenom is still in for some hard times. Of course, the lower prices of this line due to, amongst other things, the arrival of tri-core versions make access to this family of CPUs easier; however, rivaling the prices of the Core 2 is something else.
And certainly in terms of raw performances the Phenom X3 sometimes manages to surpass competing Core 2 Duos in applications that strongly benefit from multithreading. But the lead is never that great (less than 10%), while with applications that do not benefit from more than two cores, the advantage is more obvious for Core 2 Duos.
AMD even has trouble with the price positioning of its CPU as the Phenom X3 8750 and X4 9550 are equivalent in this area. The first is slightly faster than the second in a few applications (Crysis, World In Conflict) while the X4 is largely faster in others (3ds, Maya, TMPGEnc, DiVX, Nuendo). So the interest of the X3 8750 therefore seems quite limited.
Given these performances and combined with the advantages of the Core 2 in terms of overclocking and power consumption, the situation seems clear. The Phenoms are good processors but the Core 2s are excellent! For this reason, besides the upgrade to AM2 based machines, the AMD tri and quad-core offers aren’t really too interesting – other than just prolonging the fight of David versus Goliath.
With lower performances at equal frequencies, lower frequency increases and all the while costing more to produce, the Phenom is a veritable headache for AMD. The Phenom X3 is the epitome of this and does not enable giving a second wind to K10 architecture to rival Intel’s Core 2.
Will this change? The transition to 45nm and the evolutions that go with it are one possibility but this will not happen until the end of the year. By then Intel will have launched the successor to the Core 2, the Nehalem. The potential well-being of AMD in terms of CPUs could then be the Bulldozer, its next architecture, which unfortunately shouldn’t be out before 2009/2010.
