The AMDs Phenoms have an error in them, which had to be fixed with a bios hack, slowing them down by a number of percentage points. IANACD (I am not a chip designer) so I don’t really know how accurate this explanation is. I think the relevant google term is “translation lookaside buffer” if you want to know more.
The good news is that they did a respin of the chip (more than one) to fix this, with the latest version still to be released (B3?). There is reportably a more-than-expected gain in performance from squashing the TLB bug (heard this from major x86 server vendor product manager), bringing them on par and even mildly surpassing Intel again. The new ones are hopefully on their way within a couple of months.
The performance gain is all rumour and innuendo at the moment (only pre-release B3 version chips have been reviewed so far… apparently not the real deal I’m told), so who knows what will happen in the end. Hopefully they will be at least price/performance competitive as this will be healthier in the long run.
Respin
The AMDs Phenoms have an error in them, which had to be fixed with a bios hack, slowing them down by a number of percentage points. IANACD (I am not a chip designer) so I don’t really know how accurate this explanation is. I think the relevant google term is “translation lookaside buffer” if you want to know more.
The good news is that they did a respin of the chip (more than one) to fix this, with the latest version still to be released (B3?). There is reportably a more-than-expected gain in performance from squashing the TLB bug (heard this from major x86 server vendor product manager), bringing them on par and even mildly surpassing Intel again. The new ones are hopefully on their way within a couple of months.
The performance gain is all rumour and innuendo at the moment (only pre-release B3 version chips have been reviewed so far… apparently not the real deal I’m told), so who knows what will happen in the end. Hopefully they will be at least price/performance competitive as this will be healthier in the long run.
See here for a B3 pre-release review: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3260