Reviews - AMD Phenom II: striking back with a vengeance?

[j.o.s.h.1408]

dont forget the i5's people. the budget version of the i7's

i'd say intel are prepared for whatever AMD comes out with again this year

[kalniel]

dont forget the i5's people. the budget version of the i7's

They're not budget versions of i7 at all.

[j.o.s.h.1408]

They're not budget versions of i7 at all.

what are they? i thought they are. they share some of the cool features of i7 and tossed it into a smaller socket type with not much mem bandwidth has the i7 and only dual channel

[scaryjim]

dont forget the i5's people. the budget version of the i7's

i'd say intel are prepared for whatever AMD comes out with again this year

Core i5 is quite a change to the Core i7 architecture though, from the info I've been able to rustle up (dual channel memory and no QPI - doesn't that basically make it a Core 2 with integrated memory controller?).

I'll be interested to see where it fits in the overall value picture, but it has an obvious weakness, which is that there's no direct upgrade path from Core 2 to i5, or i5 to i7. It means that Intel are forcing their customers to make a choice now and stick with it, while AMD seem to be ensuring that future Phenom IIs will always be backwards compatible to AM2(+) motherboards, allowing incremental upgrades.

Actually, researching Core i5 has put me right off using Core 2 in my next mid-range build. Curious...

[kalniel]

No QPI, integrated dual channel memory controller, integrated PCI-E controller, different socket, different motherboard chipset.

[Tidus]

Good review, nice to see AMD competitive again (at a certain price point). If I have the facts right Phenom II is only AMD's move to 45nm, a shrink of Phenom with a few architectural improvements, improved access time for L3 cache with a much needed increase in L3 cache size. So people who made comments comparing this CPU to Intels i7 had overly high expectations. With clock for clock improvements over phenom and the Cool 'n' Quite issues now resolved this CPU looks good, especially for people looking to upgrade their AMD system.

AMD have brought some competition to Intel and if the rumored Intel price cuts by the end of january are true things are already looking better for the consumer. I wonder how much faster the upcoming AM3 processors will be with their uncore clock at 2.0GHz and DDR3.