Amd Phenom 3

[cummy]

I like the AMD lineup and I am wondering if anybody has thought of what a Phenom 3 might look like? would it be worth it? Yeah and I know it is not on the roadmap.

I would like to see AMD experiment with a Phenom 3 processor. First of all a die shrink to maybe 32, 28 or 22nm would be a nice start certainly improving Energy output, changing the L2 cache to maybe 6mb and dropping the L3 to about 4mb; leasing the hyperthreading technology from intel and that would be something interesting; raising HT if it is possible. AM4 anyone?

I'd love to hear if Phenom could get a third life or this is really it.

 

[imran_t]

I'd love it but I don't see it ever being done by AMD.

Isn't Llano an updated Phenom + GPU. If there's any sort of update on Phenom it may be with Llano.

 

[loneninja]

Llano is a modified Stars core, the same core used in Phenom/Athlon II/Phenom II, so technically it has lived on.

 

[beenthere]

There is no point to a Phenom III. AMD has moved on the the BD architecture which will evolve and be better than Phenom II.

 

[popatim]

The stars core is now old and inefficient compared to new Intel processors. Theres no point in a die shrink and HT is not much of a performance booster. Thepath to new performance grounds is in efficient multi-core/processor management. Even intel is shifting to a '(too)many cores' ideology. I beleive this is in prep to having various internet based server farms do your processing for you and simply using broadband to display your results. this would alleviate the need for strong processors on mobile devices yet still give them (users) the capabilities they dream of having.

 

[MU_Engineer]

I like the AMD lineup and I am wondering if anybody has thought of what a Phenom 3 might look like? would it be worth it? Yeah and I know it is not on the roadmap.

I would like to see AMD experiment with a Phenom 3 processor. First of all a die shrink to maybe 32, 28 or 22nm would be a nice start certainly improving Energy output, changing the L2 cache to maybe 6mb and dropping the L3 to about 4mb; leasing the hyperthreading technology from intel and that would be something interesting; raising HT if it is possible. AM4 anyone?

I'd love to hear if Phenom could get a third life or this is really it.

K10/Stars/Phenom sort of did get a third life as the "Husky" core in the Llano APU. It's really more of an Athlon III as it lacks L3 cache, but it does have 4 MB of L2 cache for a quad-core chip and is an improvement over the old Propus Athlon II X3/X4 die. Llanos do fine at idle for power consumption; it's the load power consumption that's not so stellar, mostly because the default Vcore on just about every standard-TDP AMD chip since the 65 nm units has been absurdly high.

Raising HT speed on a single-socket CPU does little to nothing for performance as all the HT link does is connect the NB (and indirectly, the SB) to the CPU. Not all that much data flows through there unless you have a non-Sideport IGP in the northbridge. Some people post that raising the HT speed helps performance because the HT speed depends on the uncore (L3/IMC) speed and raising the uncore's speed really does improve performance (mostly due to higher L3 speed) especially when there is a large difference between core and uncore speed.

If you wonder what HyperThreading would look like on an AMD chip, look at Bulldozer and you'd get a general idea. Bulldozer's multithreading is a little different than Intel's HyperThreading as each logical core does have some of its own dedicated physical hardware in Bulldozer (integer pipelines, an L1 cache), but it follows the same general idea of scheduling two threads per one complete set of core execution resources. Intel's approach is quick and dirty but cheap, AMD's is a little more costly but more elegant and has the possibility to perform much more consistently...once the likely cache-related bugs get worked out.

 

[jaguarskx]

AMD will be abandoning CPU designs in the near future in favor of the APU. That's my opinion at least. Server CPUs will probably be the exception. I think Piledriver is be AMD's final AM3+ CPU.

It should be interesting to see how Trinity performs when it is released. Unfortunately, AMD has a long road ahead if it wishes to catch up to Intel.

 

[beenthere]

I doubt Piledriver core CPUs are AMD's last desktop CPUs. AMD will likely offer high end CPUs for use with discrete graphics cards for a lot longer as it's not easy to currently package the same power in a APU. APUs however will become an excellent choice for most desktop apps because it's the future and not just for entry level desktop. AMD is definitely a year or more ahead of Intel on APUs in laptops.

 

[jaguarskx]

Intel is currently two generations ahead of AMD in CPU processing power. The release of Ivy Bridge will basically put them 3 generations ahead of AMD. Unless of course Intel drops the ball.

AMD on the other hand is currently two perhaps three generations ahead of Intel in terms of integrated graphics core. Intel's Haswell architecture will have a graphics core that has been estimated by Anandtech to be around 60% better than the Intel HD 3000. Sounds impressive, but that only puts the graphics core at roughly between a Radeon HD 5550 and Radeon HD 5570 graphics card.

However, chasing after gamers with their integrated graphics solution has generally not been Intel's priority.

 

[cummy]

Part of my reason for initially starting this thread was the improperly named phenom 2 x4 840 which was really an Athlon (propus and not deneb). Even without L3 cache the performance was near to those with the deneb core, that said, it doesn't surprise me that MU_Engineer suggest that a third life can be found in the Llanos. Against the i3-2100 the 3850 seems to be average; great for entry level gaming but very average for desktop duties.
It seems though that the limiter in the phenom is the K10 architecture which is what has been noted across multiple reviews. If AMD is to become competitive they might have to look at prolonging the life of phenom/athlon with modifications alongside the trinity and find a way to enhance performance. This by the way would not be a problem given that even with the success of the sandy bridge line Intel is still releasing Pentium and Celeron chips (albiet with a new core which kinda contradicts my point but..). The end result might be greater market segmentation (read saturation) for AMD in the same way that Intel has saturated the market with chips at every conceivable level. AMD has focused on the one big thing and have lost the gamble in Bulldozer. Yeah they are about 3 generations behind.

 

[popatim]

I too foresee AMD ending thier desktop line. But I see them introducing MP server-like systems as the replacement. I dont' seem AMD giving up the big dollar server market to Intel so this is where I see AMD heading with us so it can merge the two lines.