The Phenom II X4 810 & X3 720: AMD Gets DDR3 But Doesn't Need It
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 9, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
The Economic Problem
For the consumer, AMD's pricing strategy is incredible. For AMD and its shareholders however, the pricing is a bit tough. The Phenom II X4 940 is priced similarly to the Core 2 Quad Q9400, a chip that is 36% smaller than AMD's offering. The Phenom II X4 810 goes up against the Q8300, again, a chip that's 36% smaller. The Phenom II X3 720 is even worse shape; AMD is selling a chip that's 258 mm2 at the same price Intel sells a 82 mm2 chip; that's a 68% smaller die at the same price.
| AMD CPU | AMD Die Size | Competitive Intel CPU | Competitive Intel Die Size | Intel Size Advantage |
| AMD Phenom II X4 900 series | 258 mm2 | Intel Core 2 Quad Q9xxx/Q8xxx | 164 mm2 | 36% |
| AMD Phenom II X4 800 series | 258 mm2 | Intel Core 2 Quad Q8xxx | 164 mm2 | 36% |
| AMD Phenom II X3 700 series | 258 mm2 | Intel Core 2 Duo E7xxx series | 82 mm2 | 68% |
AMD in many cases delivers greater performance than the similarly priced Intel CPUs, but not nearly a large enough performance gap to make up for the difference in die size. Again, great for consumers, but potentially painful for AMD in the long run. As yields improve AMD should be able to make more of these cores members of the 900 family, but without a separate, smaller die there will still be economic inefficiencies at the lower end.
The Core 2 Duo E7500, Intel's high-margin competitor to the Phenom II X3 700 series
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hyc - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
I was looking for the test that justified the "DDR3 not worth it" conclusion, but didn't see it.Where did you show the results of testing the X4 910 against the X4 940, with CPU and NB clocks set identically? If you didn't test this, then how can you make any conclusion about DDR2 vs DDR3 performance on Phenom II? If I missed it, sorry for being blind.
7Enigma - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
I'm hoping since this just went up they forgot to include a couple pages. If not, hopefully they are retesting ASAP to include data....jchan2 - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
i'm intersted in seeing the benchmarks myself.if it's true that DDR2 vs DDR3 doesn't make much difference in performance, then what's the purpose of getting DD3?
TheFace - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
So that when the prices DO drop later this year, they aren't caught with their pants down playing catch up on the memory compatibility front. Also, when Joe Schmoe runs to Worst Buy to replace the computer that he got 5 years ago, with a new $600 model, he can look on the box and see DDR3 which MUST be faster than DDR2.It's a selling point. In retail, ANYTHING is a selling point as long as there is a disparity in knowledge held by the parties involved.
Targon - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
Compatibility. When Intel made the jump to DDR2, AMD waited until the prices came down on the memory. If there is no performance advantage, then the only reason to change memory types is for price reasons.For large OEMs like Dell, HP, and Gateway, it is more cost effective if all systems use the same type of memory. At this point though, since there is a price premium for DDR3 memory, just having DDR3 support on the CPU would not make an OEM add more AMD based machines to their list of systems sold.
Gary Key - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
We are still working on the comparison, but all of the initial numbers pointed to a tie between DDR3 and DDR2 in our results so far. The BIOS releases for the AM3 boards are just now coming up to speed. I had planned on significantly more information in the overclocking section but we just received a new BIOS for the 790FX boards that allow DDR3 clocking above 1600 or so.However, at like core clock speeds, DDR2-1175 C5 is just as fast as DDR3-1600 C7 in most of the benchmarks at this point. We are running tests now at the lower end of the spectrum to show 800/1066 DDR2 vs 1066/1333 DDR3. Those results still show little if any differences.
thepiratebay - Wednesday, February 25, 2009 - link
Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.66GHzin ur upper test as u can seee 2.8?????
Enoc - Tuesday, February 10, 2009 - link
DDR3 is not the problem, Deneb is bottlenecked on NB-L3 side... what it needs is NB at 2,800mhz+ with DDR3 1,600mhz+ for a good scaling...Denithor - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
"We are still working on the comparison"SO - why would you even reference DDR3 as being useless in your title if you aren't going to provide evidence to back up this comment?
Gary Key - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
We are still working on it but all results so far point to that being the case right now. It is difficult to have meaningful results ready when receiving BIOS releases that actually stabilize a board just a few hours before going to print. ;)