AMD Phenom X3 Processors
It has been about five months since AMD released their first Phenom quad core processors. The launch was somewhat disappointing in the eyes of many—lower than expected clock speeds and the highly publicized TLB bug cast quite a shadow on the highly anticipated launch.
Over the last month, however, things have finally started to turn around for AMD. Their newest B3 revision Phenom processors hit the streets to a much warmer reception. These new models are aggressively priced and are finally freed from the performance impeding TLB work around. Clock speeds are also finally increasing—2.5GHz with the latest 9850 Black Edition processor.
It goes without question that sometime in the not too distant future, quad-core processing will reach into the mainstream markets, but what about today? Although expensive, cutting-edge quad core processors gain a lot of attention in the press, 96% of all desktop PC sales include a CPU that costs less than $200. Aside from the rock bottom budget lines—this means dual core processors. I am no accountant but I can do the math and it is pretty clear that anyone in the CPU business would focus quite a bit on that segment of the market. So what do you do to stir up the competition in a market saturated in dual-cores? How about offer three cores for the price of two. This is exactly what AMD hopes to accomplish with their aggressively priced, tri-core Phenom X3.
Index
- Phenom Architecture Overview
- Specifications and Detail
- The Source of the X3
- Triple Troubles
- Testing Methodology
- Cinebench Rendering Performance
- LAME MT Audio Encoding Performance
- Sisoft Sandra Synthetic Benchmarks
- PCMark Vantage Memories and TV, Video Tests
- 3DMark 2006 and Aquamark 3
- Gaming Performance
- Overclocking
- Final Thoughts
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