AMD's Phenom X4 9950, 9350e and 9150e: Lower Prices, Voltage Tricks and Strange Behavior

The Story of Phenom's Erratic Performance

A few months ago I called AMD with a problem. In testing for AMD's Phenom re-launch, I encountered a major issue: Phenom performance actually degraded since I first tested it. There were two benchmarks in particular that saw performance go down: SYSMark 2007 and Adobe Photoshop CS3. SYSMark gave me scores that were around 10% lower than what they were when Phenom launched, despite these being B3-stepping parts. Photoshop was far worse, with performance being around half of what it was at the Phenom launch.

I originally attributed the changes to something strange that happened with the move to Vista SP1. I theorized that somehow the TLB fix was being applied to B3 stepping parts and negatively impacting performance, but WinRAR and memory tests didn't support the thought. AMD couldn't figure out what was happening so I chalked it up to a problem with my testbed or testing methodology, something I'd have to revisit at a later time.

The SYSMark issue actually went away on its own; I swapped from my 780G motherboard to a 790FX without reinstalling Windows to see if it was a 780G/integrated graphics issue, the performance problems remained. But upon swapping back, once again without a Vista reinstall, my SYSMark scores magically jumped around 10%. The "fix" lasted long enough for me to finish the benchmarks for the Phenom re-launch review, but sure enough the problem reappeared when I tried to re-run one test after I'd gotten everything I needed for the review. I never did figure out what was causing my Photoshop performance issues however.

The Culprit: Cool'n'Quiet

When I started testing for today's review, I ran into the same issue again. I always start by benchmarking SYSMark first, since the suite takes forever to complete on a single CPU. As soon as I got my first results, I realized my problem was back. Determined to find the cause I tried everything...again. The one thing I didn't change however was the Cool'n'Quiet setting in the BIOS, but I did try it this time.

Cool 'n Quiet is the marketing name for AMD's on-the-fly clock speed/voltage adjustment. Depending on the software load on the CPU, AMD's Cool'n'Quiet will adjust the p-state of the CPU cores - which includes adjusting core voltage and clock speed. If you're running a processor intensive game or application, CnQ will make sure your CPU runs at full speed, but if you're just typing a text document it will underclock/undervolt the CPU.

Phenom's CnQ is a more advanced version of what was in the Athlon 64 X2, it not only allows for individual core clock speed adjustment but is able to transition between states faster than previous versions of CnQ (at least that's what AMD implies).

Disabling CnQ increased my SYSMark scores by around 12% and cut my Photoshop CS3 render times in half (58.7s with CnQ enabled, 35.2s with CnQ disabled); enabling CnQ had the opposite effect. Gary ran similar numbers using PCMark Vantage and found a 5% difference. AMD originally insisted that the problem was because SYSMark introduces unrealistic pauses into its benchmark (so called "think" times or periods of time while the system is waiting for user input), but since we found the same issue in other benchmarks (PCM Vantage and our Photoshop test), we believe this is more than just a SYSMark issue.

The SYSMark problem was mostly repeatable, it would consistently produce lower scores with CnQ enabled on the Phenom CPUs. The Photoshop scores were a bit more erratic - the problem went away for a little while but has since returned and won't go away again, even with CnQ disabled. It is worth mentioning that the majority of our benchmarks wasn't impacted by the problem, but that doesn't mean that it won't impact your daily usage.

Note that the same problem doesn't plague the Athlon X2, this appears to be a Phenom/K10 issue only. As a reference we ran some numbers with Intel's SpeedStep enabled vs. disabled and didn't see any similar behavior.

I had found the source of my problems, but I didn't understand why it caused them.