AMD Company expands the line-up of their processors on K10 micro-architecture. Now besides quad-core Phenom X4 they will also offer triple-core Phenom X3. Let’s see if AMD managed to design a successful solution this time without switching to new production process.
AMD’s situation in the processor market these days can hardly be called enviable. AMD fans pinned a lot of hopes upon new K10 micro-architecture, however in reality it didn’t help the company create worthy rivals to Intel’s solutions, even though this micro-architecture is indeed innovative and efficient. Evident strengths of this micro-architecture, such as native quad-core design and L3 cache shared between all cores, remained in the shade because of technological issues that prevented AMD from getting to produce processors with frequencies beyond 2.5GHz. As a result, quad-ore Phenom X4 processors that are already available today turn out unable to compete not only against new 45nm Penryn CPUs, but also against the old 65nm Intel processors.
Moreover, the performance gap between Phenom X4 and Core 2 Quad is so dramatic that even the possibility of performance parity between the two is pretty vague. It is evident that 65nm production technology currently used by AMD will not allow them to increase significantly the working frequencies of their Phenom processors. As for the transition to a more advanced 45nm production process, it is scheduled to take place in Q4 2008. However, 45nm Deneb processors that should come to replace 65nm Phenom will be able to hit only 3.0-3.2GHz frequencies right from the start. And it seems to be not enough to successfully compete against the top quad-core Intel CPUs, so AMD will have to put up with the fate of an inexpensive processor supplier for another while.
AMD does understand the situation very well and tries to introduce the platform concept that will help promote not just bare CPUs but complete kits including a processor, a mainboard and a graphics card. This approach may allow the GPU to make up for insufficient processor performance, which AMD marketing people are trying to stress. However, these kits may be of interest primarily to OEMs and system integrators rather than end users, who are used to putting their systems together from individual components selected basing on their own specific preferences. That is why it is not surprising that neither AMD Spider platform with discrete ATI Radeon HD graphics, nor Cartwheel with the integrated AMD 780G chipset caused any significant stir among computer enthusiasts.
