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Phenom 9600: Good for Upgrades, but is it worth it for new systems?

Finally we are able to bring you some Phenom benchmarks!  After Phenom launched a few weeks ago, we were able to get our hands on a Phenom 9600 2.3GHz Quad Core processor and I did extensive testing on this brand new chip.  The Phenom is perhaps one of the most anticipated chips of 2007: it is indeed the first ever Quad Core CPU to have all 4 cores on a single die. 

AMD has spent a lot of time and marketing effort building up the Phenom brand - obviously intending to associate the new chip with "phenomenal" performance. There were presentations and white papers galore as to how having a "native" (all on one die) quad core solution is better than Intel's multi-chip module approach... a lot of talk about how using a shared L3 cache was superior to having cache coherency traffic sharing the FSB with I/O and memory traffic. Will AMD deliver on its implied promises?

Initially slated for 2.8GHz to 3GHz launch speeds, after several delays Phenom was finally launched at 2.2GHz(the Phenom 9500) and 2.3GHz (our Phenom 9600). Several months late, and 600MHz slower, was it worth the wait?

Only you can decide.

There is no question that there is some amazing technology in the Phenom 9600. It is the first native quad core desktop part - native, meaning that all four cores are on the same physical die - and it has some worthwhile improvements to the Athlon microarchitecture.

Unfortunately for AMD, the market could not care less if a quad core processor was a "native" quad core part, or a dual die "multi-chip module" - after all, as far as the public is concerned, if it has four cores, and fits into a single socket, its a quad core part. Joe Public could care less about cache coherency traffic going across an FSB. The public does not care about the FSB vs. point to point interconnect issue or on-processor memory controllers either - the public cares about two things:

1) Price
2) Performance

Intel also took the opportunity to take more wind out of AMD's sails by sampling the upcoming 3.2GHz QX9770 quad core Penryn processor (plug: read our review of it here) pretty much at the same time as AMD launched its Spider platform and Phenom.

Phenom improvements

Back in September, AMD "launched" Barcelona - and we covered the improvements in the architecture, one of which is 512KB L2 cache per core

Basically the following improvements were made going to Phenom:

• quad cores on one die
• 2MB L3 cache shared between all cores
• Better SSE and floating point performance
• wider integer issue (3 instruction wide)
• improved virtualization support
• better power management (individual cores can be controlled)
• 32 instruction prefetch
• single cycle 128bit floating point SSE instructions

Now let's take a quick peek at the motherboard we are running the Phenom 9600 in...