AMD's Final Phenom II Comes up Short

From DailyTech: Even as Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) finally starts to look competitive with its low-end Fusion CPU+GPU systems-on-chips (SOCs), it still has no real answer in the high performance end.

This week it released what will likely be the final member of the Phenom II family (45 nm), the high-end counterpart to AMD's budget Athlon II line. Both lines will begin a slow phase-out by June, being replaced with the chips bearing AMD's new architecture -- Bulldozer (32 nm).

The new chip is dubbed the AMD Phenom II X4-980 Black Edition.

Its four cores are clocked at 3.7 GHz, though the memory controller, HyperTransport controller, and L3 cache run at just 2 GHz, without any type of special overclocking. The chip fits neatly into AM3 socket boards and will be compatible with future AM3+ boards.

Performance-wise, the chip gets beat in numeric benchmarks (e.g. SiSoft Sandra 2011b) by its more expensive AMD hexacore brethren, the X6-1090T and X6-1100T.

It also gets blown away by Intel Corp.'s (INTC) lowest end Nehalem (45 nm) i7 processor, the Core i7-860. Let that sink in for a minute -- Intel's slowest quad-core i7 processor, released in September 2009, can still beat AMD's fastest quad-core processor, released in May 2011.

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