The Phenom story/fail?

B

Butter

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 30, 2011
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Hey guys,

I've been lurking this forum for a few weeks in lieu of the bulldozer "letdown". I was waiting to decide between a personal AMD system or an Intel system and went with 2500k due to that awesome deal at Microcenter, and also because a lot of the higher end chipsets for AM3+(990x/fx) is never in a mATX form (I needed a small form with some upgradability in the future).

I supported AMD in terms of GPU side with a Asus 6870 DC 1GB.

BUT I DIGRESS.

I've been trying to find the story about the original phenom but I can't find it anywhere.... Can someone enlighten me on the Phenom story?

PS. I probably plan to make an AMD system in the next build since I actually like to alternate companies.
 
well i can tell you this based on personal experiences. i jumped on the phenom x4 9600 i thought it was good enough for me. then i started tampering and figure out to over clock and it didn't turn out so grate. Further more those chips had the infamous TLB bugs and pretty much lock up and fail. But those chips were decent at the time got things i needed to be done i was able to play games video encode and all. It honestly depends on personal preferences. So what i feel is that phenom = bulldozer's issues now, that there's a "bug." But when i got to the phenom ii it was a lot better than i expected. So in the future if they ever do come out with BD II i think that would be equal to phenom ii from the original phenom
 
Butter said:
I've been trying to find the story about the original phenom but I can't find it anywhere.... Can someone enlighten me on the Phenom story?
Click to expand...
Basically it was a disappointment at the time of its launch as its performance were not as good as the older Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Quad CPUs at the time. Plus there was the issue of their price and that TLB bug that everyone was talking about. This Phenom review should shed some light:
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2007/11/19/amd_phenom_spider_vs_intel_qx9770/
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2008/03/26/amd_b3_phenom_fixes_tlb_issues/

Butter said:
PS. I probably plan to make an AMD system in the next build since I actually like to alternate companies.
Click to expand...

Wouldn't recommend that unless you have a really low budget.
 
It was late
IPC was low compared to Core 2 (but better than K8 across the board)
Clock speed was low
Power usage was high

Sound familiar?

The TLB issue never affected anyone on this board unless they were running hardware assisted virtualization. For non-virtualized workloads (or software VMs) the chuip was fine. The problem was that the BIOS work around for the TLB bug decreased performance ~10%. Some boards let you turn the workaround off if you weren't affected.

Of course later steppings and Phenom II fixed all of the above but never caught Intel
 
I just recently sold my Phenom 9600 BE B2 stepping. I ran it at 2.6Ghz on stock voltage on the stock cooler. I had it up to 3.0Ghz on the stock cooler at 1.4V but did not want to push it harder since temps were high on the stock cooler. I probably would have done 3.1-3.2 with a good aftermarket cooler and 1.5V. I left the TLB on ( had to manually write to the MSR with phenom TLB disable since windows Vista SP1 and up would automatically patch the TLB and rape performance as well as windows 7). The hit was anywhere from 10%-30% performance reduction because of this stealth patch. The only reason I found this out is because Dragon Age Origins would grind to 1-5FPS after extended play which lead me to search for a solution which led me to find out about the stealth patch related to the TLB. The TLB patch in the bios was disabled so I had to reason to think it was that, but it was beacause of the microsoft stealth patch.

I dont know if most people knew that Microsoft stealth patched the TLB bug, and there was no way to remove it other than directly writing to the CPU registers after windows loaded. This could have caused performance hits that people may have blamed AMD for.

Overall I found it to be a great processor. I ran it for almost 3 years. It was very comparable to a Q6600 in most situations but required about 50-100Mhz clock speed over the Q6600 to match it. I bus clocked it and lowered the multiplier to reach my goals. The Phenom responded very well to the bus clock. It was pared with a good quality Gigabyte GA-MA790GX-UD4H and DDR2 1066 (@ 1166-1200) which really helped. I did not have the same experience that many people had with the Phenom.

With onboard video, the system would pull about 155 watts at the wall full load folding.

I came from a single core Athlon 64 3700+, so it was a large upgrade for me.
 
Untitledone said:
Overall I found it to be a great processor. I ran it for almost 3 years. It was very comparable to a Q6600 in most situations but required about 50-100Mhz clock speed over the Q6600 to match it. I bus clocked it and lowered the multiplier to reach my goals. The Phenom responded very well to the bus clock. It was pared with a good quality Gigabyte GA-MA790GX-UD4H and DDR2 1066 (@ 1166-1200) which really helped. I did not have the same experience that many people had with the Phenom.
Click to expand...

I waited for the B3 stepping of the Phenom I back in 2008, and went with a 9850BE which has a default clock speed of 2.5GHz, but which runs at 3.0GHz without voltage adjustment totally stable, using the AMD factory HSF. I've put that chip into an HTPC, and just to save a bit of power, I've disabled one of the four cores, since I find it runs just fine with 3 for this purpose. The B3 stepping fixed the TLB problem completely, so I never had to deal with that issue. The best part about going with the 9850BE instead of the Q6600 back in September of 2008, is that you can toss in a 6 core Phenom II into that same machine and get a ton of extra performance out of it without any other changes: the socket is pin-compatible, and the Phenom IIs have a DDR2 memory controller as well as a DDR3 memory controller built-in. Not bad for a 3 year old motherboard! I've upgraded my CPU already to the one in my sig, but my friend is still chugging along with his identical 9850BE CPU/mobo combo, and he's just now considering tossing in a Phenom II 960T for $130 and seeing if he can unlock all 6 cores. That's something he definitely couldn't do if he'd gone Intel P45 mobo and Q6600 back in 2008! Intel's sockets have changed about 3 times since then.
 
same as bulldozer, though it wasn't a complete rehash of the cpu design.

Manufacturing couldn't deliver on design goals, phenom 2 was what AMD likely intended phenom 1 to be, which will likely play out again as fx2 or whatever they decide to call the respin, they will have to differentiate it so consumers know it's better.
 
I'll admit, though: my Phenom 9850 is great for rendering in Mental Ray, and modern day applications are only NOW taking advantage of multi-threading. Gaming, however, is RUBBISH.
 
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