AMD's fastest Phenom X4 9850 desktop CPU tested, Intel points and giggles like brat
By Thomas Ricker 
posted Mar 27th 2008 5:45AM
posted Mar 27th 2008 5:45AM
Today's benchmark day for AMD's fastest desktop processor -- the Phenom X4 9850. Free of the nasty TLB (Translation Lookaside Buffer) bug, the stage is now set for a head-to-head with Intel's best. While it's a significant step forward for AMD, the 9850 proc hardly compares with Intel's best quad-core desktop CPUs. Nevertheless, as PCPer says, "any enthusiast or gamer looking for a ~$240 processor is going to have a fantastic experience with the 9850." We're just happy to see AMD back on track and ready to compete. Now get to it AMD, faster clock speeds and 45-nm processes please? Intel needs someone banging at the door to keep Moore's Law from becoming Moore's Recommendation.
Update: Oh, by the way, the 2.5GHz X4 9850 is now shipping.
Update: Oh, by the way, the 2.5GHz X4 9850 is now shipping.
Read -- PC Perspective
Read -- Hot Hardware
Read -- X4 950 now available
I'm a big AMD fan and I will continue to support AMD. The last Intel CPU I bought was a Pentium4 2.4 GHz. After that I have been AMD all the way. Intel is leasing in performance now but remember it was the opposite for a few years. Intel is a HUGE company and can throw an enormous amount of resources and money to develop new CPUs. Much more the AMD can ever dram of. Intel is also dominating the market for CPUs totally. So I support AMD. Just thinking of Intel and how they are trying to crush AMD makes me sick.
You're loyalty is sweet, but also stupid. As a consumer you shouldn't subscribe to brand loyalty, but should be evaluating each product on a price vs performance basis. I've had a AMD K6-2, T-Bird 1.2ghz, XP 2400+, XP 2600+, Athlon x64 3400+, which were all great processors at purchase, and were at a reasonable price. AMD have fallen off the bandwagon however, so I moved to Intel. If AMD get their shit together, I'll move back, but not before.
Brand loyalty is straight out silly. Do yourself a favour and get what's best at the time of purchase. Don't be a sucker.
Mark's right, your loyalty is 'sweet' but utterly misguided.
If people continue to buy AMD just because they're not Intel as opposed to choosing their processors based on merit alone, then it just means that AMD will be slower in getting their arses into gear and actually competing with Intel.
If people stop buying AMD, then they'll have to sort themselves out. Well, that or die a slow and deserved death.
Brand loyalism could actualy bee a good thing, to some extent. We consumers have the power to say what is OK for a company to do and not to do. For example if you have a company A and a company B, company A have the better product but uses foul play and "ugly" methods. Wich company's product would you buy ?
I know neither Intel or AMD use fair play, but Intel is probably the least fair.
@Iain
I generally buy AMD for their better Linux support. And also because AMD, as second in market, generally has better offers.
Intel has better quality. But now with upgrade cycle of two years - when you need to replace mobo - make the whole point of Intel advantage moot.
Formula didn't changed in years: Intel is more expensive, have better quality; AMD is cheaper, but still provides sufficient performance for the buck.
Loyalty is quite silly - if it is about a product. To product there are only two metrics: whether you can afford it and whether it does the job for you. Rest is rubbish.
@ihar
From what I see performance/$$ Intel is the cheaper option and the best choice currently.
As everyone has said brand loyalty is silly with brands this huge. If you're supporting your local breadmaker then it's not so bad :)
@theblokesupposedlyknownasMartin: how are Intel any less fair than AMD?
They're both companies whose sole aim is to make money.
@Philips: of course, Intel will not be ideal for everyone but for most people, at this point in time, you have to wonder why they would want to buy AMD.
Ok, yeah, they're a bit cheaper but this Phenom isn't that much cheaper than the low-end Intel quads and it's only just about hanging in there. If you go down the AMD range to try and save money, the performance drops off dramatically - there is such a thing as false economy, saving a bit of money now but costing yourself more in the future (when you have to upgrade your under-powered AMD CPU earlier than you would a slightly more expensive Intel one).
I just get whatever faster and cheaper. When it comes to pc therms, it all aboout the spec (^_^)
Loyalty is misguided? Silly?
Why can't someone cast his economic vote AGAINST a cpu monopoly? Do you Intel switchers really want to pay much higher CPU prices once AMD is gone?
As with any economic segment, competition always makes things better for the consumer...quality, cost, inovation, etc. Some people might want to maintain those in the CPU market rather than wear a "My rig is faster than your rig" T-shirt.
Why is Karl Viklund low ranked for considering something other than performance/cost? It's a perfectly reasonable position: not everybody is a capitalist whore.
It's almost like you people have forgotten the situation a few years ago when there was NO choice. Intel did what they wanted, holding back releases, since there was no commercial need to release their best efforts, and charging what the hell they liked.
Supporting the little guy is often good, it aids competition and keeps them in business so they are there when you need them. People are very quick to criticise monopolies, but they didn't get there on their own. It's that same attitude that pushes jobs abroad and funds unethical governments.
If you follow your capitalist performance/cost metric you would always shop online and never at your local store, which would go out of business. Then what happens when you need inkjet supplies for your report that's due in 1 hour?
So my point is: support who you like, there's more to life than counting pennies.
Disclaimer: I know nothing about the operations of either company. I just like the fact that there's a choice. (And for the record: I'm a Core 2 man)
Loyalty is misguided? Did you see what happened to Blu-ray player prices when HDDVD bowed out? Loyalty to AMD may save us all some big bucks in the long run.
Because AMD are doing such a great job forcing down Intel's prices just now...
@jake
http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu_2007.html?modelx=33&model1=1106&model2=874&chart=444
i dont know, toms hardware lists price to performance and that top is pretty green, and to me when you consider that my 90$ amd 4800+ is only outscored by 190 in pc mark by my friends 190$ c2d, and the fact that my motherboard was 90$ and his was 140$ i think i won. i also consider the mobo in this factor and intel motherboards have no innovation, produce more heat, use tons more electricity, and cost a ton more
what a boneheaded thing to say.
competition isn't good for the consumer? what should intel be trying to do, if not beat amd, have a picnic with 'em?
please keep buying AMD, as it means my intel chips are cheaper :)
@Bufsabre
well said, AMD does own the bargain bin.
good news
love that sentence: Intel needs someone banging at the door to keep Moore's Law from becoming Moore's Recommendation. hehe
benchmark your brains wé ird0
More's Law looked always stupid. As developer I know first-hand that frequency means sh*t to performance.
Hardware is getting cheaper and cheaper. More and more of features gets implemented in hardware (think GPU) rather than in software (think CPU).
To me and for most of what I was doing in the past years 300MHz was sufficient. For multimedia one needs more of horse power, yet CPUs can't do it without hardware support anyway. With hardware acceleration factored in, CPUs do not need that much horse power then. Well, except of running Supreme Commander of course... ;)
Moore's Law states that the number of transistors placed on an IC will double every two years. Why is that stupid? And what does frequency have to do with it?
@Ihar `Philips` Filipau
Heavy Drinking + Engadget = WTF
AMD needs the "bulldozer" core ASAP!
No, they need the killdozer, and take it out on intel's HQ
i think this is great, looking at the numbers.. this is good enough for any die-hard AMD fan to go AMD, i sure would... but i went q6600 3 months ago... ohhh.... dang
They can diffuse it in Germany all they want....still got a bomb on their hands.
I see what you did there.
I don't.
I'm a bit slow in the mornings :'(
diffuse almost = defuse.
From looking at the benchmarks, it doesn't look like Engadget is doing the new Phenoms justice. It seems like clock for clock they're on par or better than their Core 2 counterparts.
For the most part, the Q9300 owned the night. It generally outpaced the old Q6600 quad core and the new Phenom quad core in most of our tests. In a clock-for-clock test, we would declare the Q9300 the winner with the Q6600 as the runner up.
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/amd_s_new_x4_quad_core
Still pretty close though considering the processor is brand new and even more so when you take in to account price.
They don't completely blow the AMD out of the water, no but it's still very much in Intel's favour.
As for price, you can definitely get the Q6600 for less than that and since the Phenom is brand new, you're unlikely to be seeing it at the price listed any time soon.
Of course the big point though is that this is the top-of-the-range Phenom struggling to keep up with Intel's bottom-of-the-range offerings, one of which is even out of date now.
"Now get to it AMD, faster clock speeds"
Clock speeds don't matter (that much). Performance is not dictated by them. That's why Intel stopped with naming their processors based on their clockspeed and why AMD came to the front all those years ago boasting faster CPUs with lower clock speeds. Sure they can help, but its not what defines its performance.
Clock speed is one that affects performance (esp between processors with same architecture).
No, clock speed isn't the be all and end all but the days of slower AMD processors out-performing faster Intels are long gone.
In fact, recently, the opposite has been true.
So, unless AMD produces something faster, they're never going to get out of the basement performance-wise.
amd needs to increase their hyper transport speeds and their cache sizes to run again with intel in the speed department but intel needs to remover their head from their ass to run with amd in the price department, and maybe produce some motherboards with some innovation
Don't INTEL upgrades generally require you to replace the mobo and ram as well? AMD seems to have a better upgradability. Being the highspeed KING is meaningless to me, if I have to pay out 50% more cash, just for a lousy 10%...No-one can afford a Buick Grand National, so they buy a Chev instead...
Yeah it's not like you have to change mobo with AMD do you.. oh wait.
They are both the same on that front, to run a phenom at full blast you need an AM2+ socket, that means a new mobo, and the same for intel, you can run the new generation on old 775 but for full speed you need the chipsets with new functions like the x38/x48, which also require new DDR3 RAM andsoforth, they both don't seem to look ahead and just keep demanding new motherboards every year while at the same time they keep raising the price of those, and already motherboards are more expensive than the damn CPU and even beefy graphics cards.
But of course that's only an issue if you go for the fastest setup I guess.
Well i would love to have bought a nice mid to high range AMD cpu an coupled it with a nice mid to high end AMD graphics card and had it work smooth as with vista 64bit. but in reality i bought a q6600 and an 8800gt. there was simply no competition with price and performance being my main stipulations. its all well and good that they created a "proper" quad core, but they are way to late to the party and still generaly beaten by intel. i would love to have an AMD sticker on the front of my case, but as im sure many people have done, i bought a cheapish good quality q6600, i just hope that next time i go to upgrade my pc (not for a long tiem) AMD have something to offer. a step in the right direction, and a joruney of a htousand miles starts with just that step, many more to go.
FYI - TLB = Translation lookaside buffer
im more of an intel fan though.
Surely you guys meant "Translation Lookaside Buffer", instead of "Transaction Lookaside Buffer" you so explicitly clarified for your readers.
I don't get it:
"any enthusiast or gamer looking for a ~$240 processor is going to have a fantastic experience with the 9850."
But the Core 2 Quad Q6600 beats 9850, though it runs at 100 Mhz less and you can get it for just a little over 200$. So why should I get an AMD again?
Because I'm stubborn?
I think Intel is doinggreat right now and the positions shifted 180°.
Some time ago AMD was faster with lower clock speed ... and now I don't even see light on the horizon for AMD, which now seems to be the new Cyrix, or VIA?
And as already said in other posts: don't be stubborn and stick to a company out of some crazy principles: buy the better product.
C2D E8400 owns both in terms of gaming
I hate you all. Take the fanboyism and shove it up your ass.
You are missing one very important point here. 95% of the market are mainstreamers. Mainstreamers buy systems or build systems with integrated graphics. AMD wins on games and HD video when paired to the 780G chipset when compared to ANY Intel CPU plus the crappy G35 chipset.
The proof is here:
Intel BluRay:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V741rSx3-5U
Intel Games:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kd0Of4PnpQk
Try to dispel this!
When you consider the platform, it is good deal. I am in the market for a quad core processor. The 770-790fx motherboard platform allows from PCI-E 2.0 at half the price of a comparable intel motherboard.
pci-e 2.0 may not be needed, but its the most future proof solution. The only reason to get a quad core is because you are looking to the future. Dual cores crush quads in most applications currently. Once the software adjusts for quads, it will be a different story.
I may go with intel in the end, but I still have a few months. AMD just put themselves back in the running.
Still... a Phenom isn't that PHENOMINAL after all! more of a crap!
Oh well Im already getting "a fantastic experience with" a Q6600 and I only payed $199.99 for it. Then I see today that the rest of the Intel 45nm quads are FINALLY shipping.
Same here—I just bought mine on Monday. I would've liked to go with AMD, but the TLB bug was a showstopper. So, a Q6600, a new motherboard, 4 gigs of RAM, and a new video card (my old one was a GeForce MX from 2002), for a little under $500.
And, frankly, I like Intel a lot better than I used to these days, because they release so much stuff as open source. When I needed a new laptop in the fall of 2006, that's what decided me: the only way to get a laptop with WiFi that was well-supported on Linux was to get one with an Intel 3945 or 4695 (since Intel maintains the drivers), which meant an Intel CPU.
(Intel does other stuff, too, not just drivers for their hardware; I'm using their computer vision package in a project for work.)
With Intel pulling ahead in performance, and getting ready to release CPUs based on a switched fabric like HyperTransport, I think AMD is going to have to scramble pretty hard to catch up. I hope they do, but I'm not too confident.
I a budget build Price per performance, AMD usually wins. This is good for all. I use both Intel and AMD now.
Good to see they haven't bombed out just yet. Someone needs to step up the battle to get better competitive pricing and drive the prices down a bit.
Its kinda sad actually.
AMD really needs to get some kind of miracle.
A Core 2 Quad 2.66GHz can be had for 250. And it outpaces and obliterates the performance of this processor.
I meant 2.4 GHz.
Whoops.
I bought a Phenom9600 to stick in my latest PC.
I must say, Im happy. I know the Intel counterparts are probably faster, but AMD has been good to me over the years, and this was definitely affordable.
I cant complain of many, if any, problems. Its a solid chip, OCs fine, and works.
It definitely holds its own with Crysis, and still lets me run AIM, Flock, and xFire in the background.
If I were to put together another gaming machine, Im not sure I would go AMD, but for a highend office PC, definitely.
The Phenom Series offers more than enough power for the average user.
You make a great point which highlights that today's games, even Crysis, are GPU-limited, not CPU-limited. In other words, the GPU matters more in games than the CPU. Buy the Phenom X4 9850/2.5G at $229 and a $500 graphics card, not an Intel Quad/3.0G at $1,000 with a crappy graphics card.
I am an AMD fan and currently use an Athlon X2. I think for the price, AMD processors are the best choice for the average user, but if you want real power, even I say go Intel. I am impressed with some of the performance numbers. I really hope that AMD can pick it up and give Intel a run for their money. Although I am loyal to AMD for desktops, I prefer Intel for mobile for a number of reasons. This processor is a step in the right direction, but they still need much more. Come on, AMD!
What mares is that AMD has all those great stories on paper, with their 'real' 4 cores and their hypertranport 2 and still their best effort with all that stuff that is supposed to be so much more advanced can't beat intel, and that just makes you feel they are doing something wrong.
They should do like intel did and get some israeli ingenuity in their camp, some practical thinking that looks at the real world too.
Or you could buy a q6600, which is still faster, but will actually overclock. And it will overclock quite a bit, with 3.6ghz completely doable.
Everyone needs to keep in mind that without the competition then everything slows down or comes to a halt. I support AMD because when they make a processor i know it will work and not give me problems (use and FX55) unlike the many problems i have had before with Intel until i switched to AMD. i also recall that for the longest time AMD was in the lead and Intel couldnt even catch up. and im sure that AMD will catch up and surpass Intel agan :)
Intel might produce the better processors right now, and I have bought an E6750 but that doesn't stop me from buying AMD as well. To be perfectly honest I couldn't tell a huge difference between that and my TL-58 powered laptop even though they are in theory worlds apart. The only time I noticed the difference was when I overclocked them, and your average consumer hasn't even heard of overclocking. Add to that the fact that I have an Athlon xp 2400+ running a computer with vista with no percievable slowdown and you get the impression that it doesn't make a difference what brand you buy, you're not going to notice the difference.
I like AMD and Ati because there fighting against a giant: Intel,Nvidia and Microsoft act as one big monopoly lovers club, there very close and they kill any competition just for there own greed. I hate monopoly's because this possition is far more importand for them than anything else. AMD and Intel are like apples and bananas, there both nice in the way they are. It's just what you like most for any reason. I just love my Spider system from AMD with 2 Ati R3870x2, because it's dam'n cool and I think it's a nice concept. As for the concept of compatibilty is far more importand than if a benchmark got's a few points or 3 fps more or less for hundreds of dollars more. Any has his/hers own reason why he/she thinks this or that is better, some are smarter than others. :-)
I looked forward to spend $200 upgrading my motherboard just for this chip, and for it then to be crap and slow in a year's time!
That's unless it works with my asus AM2 mobo which I doubt it does. While Mark's comment about brand loyalty is true, I find it very irritating having to upgrade the motherboard and rebuild the whole PC again every year or two.