AMD promises Phenom-enal quad core performance

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 15 May 2007 14:04

Opinion and Analysis

AMD has unveiled the name of its new generation of super duper quad and dual-core processors, the Phenom family, promising significant improvements in the visual aspects of computing. For the ordinary user not playing games or watching videos, however, the new processors are not likely to make a lick of difference.

What, you ask? You mean to say the new AMD quad-core platform, due out in the second half this year, together with the new DirectX 10 ATI Radeon HD 2000 series chip, won't deliver blinding performance? Well yes it will if you've got graphics intensive computing tasks. But for the ordinary home or office user, it will be a non-event.

In fact, that unfortunately has been the experience of many if not most PC users for more than 10 years. Intel or AMD releases a new whizz bang processor, we users wait with great expectations, adding another 1GB or more of RAM than what we had in our previous computer, and what do we get? Nothing!

With all that increased processing power, one would expect faster boot-up and loading times, no problems with running low on available memory when running  multiple applications, and measurably faster performance for all the same applications we ran on our previous machines.

The truth is, however, my brand new 2GHz Core 2 Duo computer with 2GB of RAM runs no faster than my previous 1.6GHz Pentium 4 with 1 GB. Both run Windows XP SP2 and both crash, freeze and stall equally often.

Talking to my techie colleagues and various industry consultants reveals the interesting fact that in many instances the new dual-core processors will run slower than the previous generation single core models. The reasons are two-fold. One is that the processor clock which was cranked up to above 3GHz for 
later model Pentiums has been wound down to just over 2GHz for the fastest dual core processors. The other is that most of today's ordinary applications can't take advantage of the multithread processing capabilities of dual-core processors.

Theoretically, dual cores can perform more operations for the same clock speed as single cores. However, without the ability of most applications to take advantage of their full power, this feature serves little purpose.

So excuse me if I don't get excited when I hear terms like Direct Connect Architecture, shared L3 cache, integrated memory controller and four cores on a single die. It will mean very little if my computer takes forever to boot up, applications slow down when I'm running too many simultaneously and I have to reboot my computer every second day.