11 replies to this topic

[jammin]

OCC recently took a trip to Austin, TX to see what AMD has in store for the future.

Check out the article here.

[RA1D]

Nice article, Alan! It's awesome that you were able to go to Texas and check out AMD's upcoming chips. Nice to see the air cooled chip hit 4GHz. Maybe with watercooling, we'll be able to hit 4.5GHz or so.

[suchuwato]

Cool stuff. Hopefully Phenom II will be a bit more exciting

[ajmatson]

Nice article, Alan! It's awesome that you were able to go to Texas and check out AMD's upcoming chips. Nice to see the air cooled chip hit 4GHz. Maybe with watercooling, we'll be able to hit 4.5GHz or so.

Ofcourse I am bound by the Embargo however I can say I was quite impressed with what I saw. I feel AMD is making the comeback that they need. One other thing of note for hardcore overclockers is the new set of Phenom II's are no longer affected by the cold bug that caused then to become unstabe at temps in excess of -20C so there is going to be some hardcore LN2 overclocking on these bad boys. I was personally able to play around with a setup with a Phenom II, 790GX board and a HD 4870 and they actually had to pry it out of my hands when I was done. Myself and another attendee were so impressed with the overclocking that we fried a board pushing the chip on a CoolIT Freezone Elite cooled system

[Zerox12]

This is all great to hear. As somebody who is in need of an upgrade shortly this looks quite promising since sticking with AMD would make it so I won't have to buy a new waterblock or top and mounting bracket for the existing one. Hopefully next chip I buy isn't a complete dud like the one I have.

Can you comment at all about performance or will I have to wait in eager anticipation until the NDA is lifted? If these new Phenom 2s can hold their own price to performance with the CPUs from intel I will be a very happy man.

[ajmatson]

Unfortunately we are bound by NDA and cannot comment specifically. I can say I am happy though as much of my time here at OCC has been concentrated on AMD based systems and this looks like the jump we need

[tkrow21]

What's exciting is that "Phenom II" was not supposed to be a real challenge for Intel, Bulldozer was.

[Waco]

I was at Supercomputing '08 and I heard from numerous people that the Shanghai (AKA Phenom II) was roughly 30% faster clock for clock...and with the increased clock speeds it should be a real contender.

[ajmatson]

I was at Supercomputing '08 and I heard from numerous people that the Shanghai (AKA Phenom II) was roughly 30% faster clock for clock...and with the increased clock speeds it should be a real contender.

That is what I heard too BTW the Phenom II is based off of what made Shanghai great not actually Shanghai which is a server chip

[Error 404]

Wow! That really looks great. Lucky Alan gets to go play with the new chips...Reviewers....

I'm looking forward to this thing's release

Wonder if I can talk AMD into giving up an ES...Hm.

~Error


Edit: Are these AM2+/DDR2 chips or AM3/DDR3 ones?

Edited by Error 404, 23 November 2008 - 11:20 AM.

[ajmatson]

They are both AM2 plus AM3. They are backward compatible with most AM2+ hardware and then they will fit AM3 boards when they move to DDR3. Best of both worlds

Honestly I think this is the magic AMD has been waiting for. They will never be Core i7 extremes but for the price AMD has been releasing their hardware they are great price to performance.

[My_Inner_Fred]

Im pretty sure intel will have to lower prices when this beast comes out =P