Quad-core rumble: Penryn vs. Phenom

It's the day of multiple cores and we bring you the latest showdown between AMD and Intel. In the blue corner, we have the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 and in the red corner we have the AMD Phenom 9500.

Under the Hood

In line with the earlier 65nm based quad-core processors from Intel; the QX9650 is essentially a combination of two dual core processors. The new QX9650 has a 1333MHz front side bus (FSB) and the 45nm fabrication allows Intel to keep the die size in check while bumping the L2 cache to a total of 12MB (6MBx2) as opposed to 8MB (4MB x2) of the earlier quad-core series. Along with the higher cache, the Penryn range also adds support for the latest SSE4.1 instruction set, allowing applications like Divx 6.6.1 to take advantage of the multiple cores. The QX9650 has a rated core clock speed of 3GHz, so in effect, you have four cores running at 3GHz each! While the QX9650 is the highest in the quad range, lower clocked variants in the form of Q9550 and Q9450 clocked at 2.83 GHz and 2.66 GHz respectively are expected soon.

The AMD Phenom 9500 is a native quad core processor with four individual cores. The Phenom is a 65nm-based chip with 512KB of L2 cache per core, taking the total amount of cache to 2MB as compared to the 12MB for the QX9650 and 8MB for the QX6600 from Intel. AMD introduced another layer 2MB shared L3 cache for the four cores that helps boost performance by acting as a write buffer for system memory. The Phenom 9500 under the test is clocked at 2.2 GHz while the fastest Phenom available today (9700) is clocked at just 2.4 GHz. The clock speeds for the Phenom chips are significantly lower as compared to their Intel counterparts and this clearly trickles down to lower performance figures as you see in the table. In terms of power consumption, the Phenom 9500 has a clear lead over Intel with a TDP of 95W as compared to the 130W for the QX9650 and the Q6600 which is rated at 105W. Phenom also adds SSE4a support which is incompatible with the SSE4.1 instruction set from Intel.

It's Showtime!!

In our performance test, the Phenom results were quite disappointing; it's about 30-35 percent slower than the Intel QX9650. Since both the processors aren't exactly comparable in terms of price point (Rs 12,000 [US$296] for Phenom vs. Rs 40,000 for the QX9650 Extreme) the variance in performance is justified. What really spoils AMDs party is the current Intel Core2 Q6600 processor which is placed in the exact price point as the Phenom but performs 20-25 percent better than the Phenom. The Intel Core2 Q6600 is the real "quad-core hero" today, priced at almost a fourth of the cost of the Intel QX9650. The Q6600 is just 15-20 percent slower and clearly outperforms the Phenom in every test.

While the Intel QX9650 is the performance king, its high price point and comparatively low performance gain makes it less appealing when compared to the Q6600 from Intel itself which is a much better quad-core option. AMD needs to work hard, since there is a lot to be done to catch up with Intel for performance and value in the quad core processor space.

(Source : http://www.networksasia.net/article.php?type=article&id_article=3236)