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LOSTCIRCUITS
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| AMD's Phenom Processor - Beyond Erratum 298 | |
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(Author: Michael Schuette, January 1, 2008) |
Summary
AMD's release of the Phenom processor along with the Spider platform was not exactly a head turner. Well, maybe the other way. There has been a lot of confusion, benchmarks chasing each other, whether they were relevant or not and by the end of the day, the entire platform is still a mystery. We took the current flagship edition, that is, the Phenom 9900 and pitted it against the Phenom 9600 Black Edition with the lower speed NorthBridge. We ran AOD and different memory frequencies and then compared the results with whatever competition is out there. We also did some more research into Erratum 298 and the bug it describes along with possible scenarios where it can occur and the workaround solution a.k.a. patch that could be worse than the bug itself. And that is not just in terms of performance.
Let me give you a hint: it was pretty exciting....
The New Kid in Town
A launch of a new CPU is always an exciting event, one way or the other. Well, I am talking about new processors rather than faster speed grades of existing dies without any additional tweaks. Those are predictable and aside from a potential leapfrogging in a head to head race between the two giants Intel and AMD, there is not very much one could wring out of such events. A different story altogether is the release of a major revision, like adding SSE instructions with AMDs Palomino or adding new cache and a new manufacturing process like in the case of Intel’s Penryn.
Nothing really, though, beats the launch of a completely new generation of CPU. For those who have been around long enough to remember, the by far most exciting event along these lines was the launch of the original Athlon at a point where AMD was on its knees and where nobody knew whether they would even be able to keep the lights on. At the time we were working with Drew Prairie and Dale Weisman and hell, the fire of excitement was kindled until nobody would talk about anything anymore but the lifting of the embargo. And what a triumph it was! The original Athlon 600 with the Fester motherboard, despite a gaping hole in form of missing platform / chipset support, literally trounced anything out there. All of a sudden, the ugly Texan duckling turned into a beautiful swan and overnight became the darling of any computer power user.
10 Years After .. Along Came A Spider …
Neither are we talking about Alvin Lee, nor about James Patterson, but AMD’s launch of the Phenom a decade later, which probably deserves the Darwin Award for the worst PR move of the year. There was nothing confident about the release, predefined and preconfigured hardware with a few selected software applications watered down to defocus onto the platform rather than on the 10th generation AMD processor… what a jubilee! The only thing missing from the event was probably VIA Centaur’s G. Glenn Henry giving a speech about benchmarks he likes or “grudgingly accepts” or “dismisses as irrelevant”. It is our sincere hope, though, that AMD will not follow in Centaur’s footsteps to become a gizmo enabler. Still, realistically the most relevant take-home message from the event was that Tahoe is beautiful and that Phenom is spelled with with a P as in Phenom, he as in henom and nom as in Phenom without Phe. At least that’s what we read from the coverage. For the record, we were missing, too.
And then, there is the issue with Erratum 298. If we can believe what is circulated in the various publications, AMD’s Phenom and Barcelona cores have an erratum that cripples the performance. Along these lines it appears somewhat funny if the same people who crucify AMD for a bug that affects the operation in one in a million cases have no problem using Microsoft Vista, which, if the same standards were applied, should carry a red flag stating “Toxic Waste, Do Not Approach Even With a 6 Foot Pole”. But wait, why don’t we at least try to stick to the facts.
A Word About Semantics
The term bug was probably coined by Hawkin's New Catechism of Electricity, an 1896 electrical handbook from Theo. Audel & Co., which included the entry:
“The term "bug" is used to a limited extent to designate any fault or trouble in the connections or working of electric apparatus.”
The words erratum (pl.: errata) or corrigendum (pl.: corrigenda) on the other hand, are terms used to describe the listing of a fault in a manual or functional description of a device. It does not require a liberal arts major to understand that the description of something is different from the actual entity that is described. With all journalistic freedom of speech, there should at least be enough understanding of language to figure that part out. But oh.. I apologize, erratum is a latin word.
 (AMD Phenom 9600 2.3GHz (HD9600WCGDBO)) |
next page: => Erratum 298 =>
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