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Skrevet af Josua Blirup
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Torsdag, 08 Januar 2009 07:10 |
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Side 1 af 19 
Today, AMD launches the Phenom II processor, and Viking Reviews are ready with both the review as well as the comparison with a selection of its closest competitors.
The Phenom II processor is launched as a part of the Dragon platform. Like the previous Spider platform, Dragon is also largely based on the marketing history of combining an AMD 790GX-based motherboard, a Phenom II processor and an ATI Radeon HD 4800 series graphics card to end up with a system with a completely unrivaled performance for its price. We will comment further on that in the course of this review.
Originally, it was AMD's plan that Phenom should compete with Intel’s golden boy, the Core 2. However, it turned out that Phenom was unable to scale well enough to beat Intel Core 2 - and what was even worse, the processor had the by now infamous "errata". Therefore, it was concluded that AMD had to compete on an appealing price/performance ratio, which meant that AMD had to tighten their belts another notch. AMD has now for many years been forced to compete on price, which several times has caused liquidity issues - most recently in relation to the acquisition of ATI.
Consequently, Core i7 was anything but welcomed by the management of AMD. By integrating the memory controller into the processor itself, like AMD, Intel managed to improve the already excellent scalability of the Core 2-series, which all things equal has made it a difficult task for the Phenom to compete with Intel. Even with the E3 revision of the Phenom, AMD never really reached alongside the Core 2, and with an even faster processor series AMD must not only surpass its previous series - the chip manufacturer will ideally need to do better than the much improved Intel architecture.
One final issue which has recently been deemed AMD's Achilles heel is the power consumption. Although AMD's Phenom processors delivered a worse performance than the Core 2, they used significantly more power, which from both an environmental and economic perspective is not persistently viable. Hence, power consumption is one of our areas of focus in this initial test of AMD's latest processor generation.
Translated by Thomas J. Jacobsen
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