AMD Dragon

Actually we did, and we deferred discussing that to this part. This piece was intended as an architectural comparison more than anything and its goal was to see how Intel's and AMD's architectures fared when equally clocked with other differences kept at a minimum. As tech geeks that's what interests us first and foremost. However that's only part of the equation.

At this time the Phenom II 940 is priced at $214.99 at Newegg, with a $25 discount bringing it down to $189.99. At the same time the Q9650 is priced at $339.99 ($309.99 after a $30 discount) at the same shop ... 50% more means that these CPUs obviously aren't intended to compete with each other directly, not to mention that the speed advantage the Q9650 has doesn't justify such a price premium. Pricewise the 940 is positioned against the Q9400 (cheaper than it, actually), which has a 12% lower core clock deficit and half the L2 cache (3MB per die for a 6MB total). Making the ignorant assumption that the cache reduction won't matter, the core down-clock alone should make it possible for the 940 to jump ahead of this only adequate competitor. Platform costs for both should be pretty much equal, contrary to what you might've heard (platform costs for Nehalem are indeed higher, but that's not here is it?). AMD has also recently further fleshed out its product line and there's a throng of products out there. We'd dare say that up to Q9550, and even 9650 levels AMD is quite competitive. You'll note that we haven't talked much about DDR3. Although support for that has been exposed via the new AM3 CPUs, to be frank it's not at all interesting at this point in time either price-wise or performance-wise. Since the more accessible lower speed bins have higher latencies than their equally accessible DDR2 equivalents, and the higher more expensive speed bins can't be entirely leveraged with current NorthBridge clocks, the performance benefits don't justify the price premium at all. DDR2 is dirt cheap even for 1066MHz sticks with decent latencies, so grab 8GB of that and don't look back.

Going forward we'll go ahead and make a wild guess that AMD will release a part that slightly outperforms the 9650 just like the 940 outperforms the 9400. On a tech level, from what we've seen there may be parts that have 2.2GHz NorthBridge clocks and 64-way associativity for the L3, though we're not ready to bet the farm on that. 6-core CPUs are on the verge of coming out in server incarnations, albeit whether or not they'll grace our desktops anytime soon is uncertain. What is certain is that until AMD comes out with a new architecture its competitive position isn't great, despite Deneb marking a return to competitiveness. For the time being they'll have to contend with hoping that this Argentine Tango they're dancing, in which Intel is the leader, won't involve many sacadas since they're not likely to weather an all out offensive. And that's all folks ... for now!