Posted by Enlightenment on 24 december 2007 @ 23:59
AMD comes with good and bad news: all faster Phenoms have been postponed until the second quarter of 2008. The good news is that AMD announced its first low-power quad-core processor. The Phenom X4 9100e is based on the B2-stepping and runs at 1,8GHz. It is given a 65W TDP rating or Thermal Design Power. Other Phenom processors have values between 89W and 125W. As a reminder: actual power consumption is lower than the TDP value indicates.
Times have been better for chip producer AMD. Especially because its new and many times delayed quad-core processor, the Phenom X4, was introduced with lower-than-expected clock speeds. To make it even worse, there is a bug in all Phenom-chips with B2-stepping; the infamous TLB-bug
. AMD announced a corrected version, labeled with B3-stepping, which will have a fix for the bug. The Phenom CPUs already released will get a version number change, the Phenom 9500 will be called 9550 for example. These corrected versions are now scheduled to hit the shelves in the second quarter of 2008:
Quad-core
Triple-core
With 65W TDP, you can expect a power usage of 45W to 50W when stressed, and hopefully a very low idle consumption (under 5W). This allows for 24/7 systems to be very energy-efficient yet have huge processing power at its disposal if your application can make use of four threads. Each thread can then run on a seperate processor core - with almost four times the raw performance of a single core.
It remains to be seen how low the idle consumption actually is, though. This spec is far more important than the maximum or stressed power consumption, because almost all processors are running idle most of the time. My fileserver, for example, runs idle about 95% of the time. Yet, it lacks sufficient processing power to saturate my network interface, because the filesystem is encrypted. Right now i get only 22MiB/s while i want to get 80MiB/s at least. I'm hoping the Phenom 9100e can provide me with high performance yet be very energy efficient. Let's hope AMD licks its wounds and Phenom becomes an interesting product.
Times have been better for chip producer AMD. Especially because its new and many times delayed quad-core processor, the Phenom X4, was introduced with lower-than-expected clock speeds. To make it even worse, there is a bug in all Phenom-chips with B2-stepping; the infamous TLB-bug
. AMD announced a corrected version, labeled with B3-stepping, which will have a fix for the bug. The Phenom CPUs already released will get a version number change, the Phenom 9500 will be called 9550 for example. These corrected versions are now scheduled to hit the shelves in the second quarter of 2008:Quad-core
| Product name | TDP | Clock speed | Cache | Launch date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AMD Phenom X4 9100e (B2) | 65W | 1.8GHz * 4 | 512KiB * 4 + 2MiB shared | Q1 2008 (Jan-Mar) |
| AMD Phenom X4 9150e (B3) | 65W | 1.8GHz * 4 | 512KiB * 4 + 2MiB shared | Q2 2008 (Apr-Jun) |
| AMD Phenom X4 9550 (B3) | 95W | 2.2GHz * 4 | 512KiB * 4 + 2MiB shared | Q2 2008 (Apr-Jun) |
| AMD Phenom X4 9650 (B3) | 95W | 2.3GHz * 4 | 512KiB * 4 + 2MiB shared | Q2 2008 (Apr-Jun) |
| AMD Phenom X4 9700 (B3) | 125W | 2.4GHz * 4 | 512KiB * 4 + 2MiB shared | Q2 2008 (Apr-Jun) |
| AMD Phenom X4 9900 (B3) | 125W | 2.6GHz * 4 | 512KiB * 4 + 2MiB shared | Q2 2008 (Apr-Jun) |
Triple-core
| Product name | TDP | Clock speed | Cache | Launch date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AMD Phenom X3 8400 (B2) | 89W | 2.1GHz * 3 | 512KiB * 3 + 2MiB shared | March 2008 |
| AMD Phenom X3 8450 (B3) | 89W | 2.1GHz * 3 | 512KiB * 3 + 2MiB shared | Q2 2008 (Apr-Jun) |
| AMD Phenom X3 8600 (B2) | 89W | 2.3GHz * 3 | 512KiB * 3 + 2MiB shared | March 2008 |
| AMD Phenom X3 8650 (B3) | 89W | 2.3GHz * 3 | 512KiB * 3 + 2MiB shared | Q2 2008 (Apr-Jun) |
| AMD Phenom X3 8700 (B3) | 89W | 2.4GHz * 3 | 512KiB * 3 + 2MiB shared | Q2 2008 (Apr-Jun) |
With 65W TDP, you can expect a power usage of 45W to 50W when stressed, and hopefully a very low idle consumption (under 5W). This allows for 24/7 systems to be very energy-efficient yet have huge processing power at its disposal if your application can make use of four threads. Each thread can then run on a seperate processor core - with almost four times the raw performance of a single core.
It remains to be seen how low the idle consumption actually is, though. This spec is far more important than the maximum or stressed power consumption, because almost all processors are running idle most of the time. My fileserver, for example, runs idle about 95% of the time. Yet, it lacks sufficient processing power to saturate my network interface, because the filesystem is encrypted. Right now i get only 22MiB/s while i want to get 80MiB/s at least. I'm hoping the Phenom 9100e can provide me with high performance yet be very energy efficient. Let's hope AMD licks its wounds and Phenom becomes an interesting product.
| Reply by stl (unregistered) on Mon, 17 Mar 2008 @ 13:04 | Quote |
If you're interested in a low-power server, you should consider the VIA C7 or similar -- it has 256-bit AES hardware on board. Works well for me (hooks in nicely to FreeBSD's crypto system, also well-supported on Linux).
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