It is always refreshing to see some new hardware coming out. Needless to say that the more exciting stuff always concerns the high-end solutions but not everybody is in the market for this kind of toy. From a financial standpoint, the low end has always been the "bread and butter" for any company and who doesn’t believe it just needs to check Intel’s latest statements regarding their Atom sales.

In the last months, AMD has gained substantial market share. Some of it has been offset by the slumping Opteron sales but the net effect is still an increase in market share. With the current CPU architecture, there is very little chance to compete against Intel’s Core i7 but again, if Intel has Nehalem and Atom as their key players, that leaves the door wide open for everything else in between. After the original Phenom, which was arguably a dud, Phenom II has picked up performance and, especially in the AM3 flavor, has reached parity or has outpaced most of the Core2 processors, at least on a $ for $ basis.

Phenom II, though, is costly to manufacture; 758 million transistors, even if they are crammed into 258 mm², still take up 258 mm² which translates in a limited number of die per wafer. In order to remain price-competitive especially in the lower market segment, AMD needs a smaller die with high performance and the latter is something that the original Athlon X2 can no longer deliver, not even with migrating the design to a 45 nm process. On the other hand, all current IC designs, including Phenom (II) are fairly modular, with the individual building blocks comprising the cores, the NB/IMC and the system request interface (SRI). In a nutshell, the recipe in this case was to take two cores and tie them to the dual channel NB/IMC after stripping out the 6 MB L3 cache. On the HT side, the known-good SRI didn’t need any replacement, therefore, everything stayed as usual.

2009 been been an interesting year so far, to say the least. AMD has released its Phenom II line of CPU to breathe some fresh wind into the desktop world, Intel has released their line of Nehalem EB 2-way server CPUs while delaying the launch of the Core i5 (if that is to be the final name of the Westmere line of processor) and all of a sudden, nothing is like it was before. In turn, AMD has been forced to pull in the launch of the Istanbul server processors from October to May - resulting in a somewhat short life for Shanghai. In the graphics market, AMD's RADEON offerings continue to dominate on price and performance and at the same time, the fab business spin-off has created some cash cushion at precisely the time where cash has become the most valuable commodity in the business. So, not all is bad in Austin / Toronto. in fact, at least from the outside, things look quite a bit better than what the gloomy downhill perspective of last fall forecasted.

Intel's Nehalem has raised the stakes, combining a superior architecture with what some might call some very dirty tricks like dynamic overclocking or Turbo Boost of single cores. In all fairness, though, whatever works works and adding custom adaptational mechanisms to accomodate the heterotypic landscape of applications in transition from single- to multithreading is a perfect example of thinking outside the box with surprisingly good results. On the other hand, if it is out there and public knowledge, then the technology is fair game for anyone - with the minor issue of intellectual property that could throw a monkey wrench into the global adoption. Needless to say that there is a lot of prior art in the public domain, resulting in the fact that patent protection often can only be obtained for some very specific ways of doing things - rather than the operational principle - even if the specific way is the most elegant way of doing things. Likewise, nobody wants to be called a copycat. Consequenty, sometimes, we see some more awkward realizations of technology maturing to life, or maybe, they only look awkward at first glance, because we have been primed by an alternative method of doing things already. Those are some of the thoughts I have been pondering in the last two weeks, benchmarking and evaluating AMD's latest desktop processor a.k.a. Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition.

The longer I am in the review business, the more the evolution of personal computer performance strikes me as nothing short of breathtaking. Aside from the raw CPU performance, the main improvements are in the world of computer graphics. Needless to say that neither one of the two big survivors in today’s graphic scene was even around when we played the first computer games on Amiga and Atari ST machines. Today we have AMD formerly known as ATI and nVidia battling it out over and again. Missing in action are Hercules, Tseng Labs, ALi, SiS, Kyro and Trident. Everybody else, including Intel, Via and Matrox, is just playing a wallflower role with the only realistic chance to break into the duo-poly coming from Intel’s mystery architecture called Larrabee.

For the time being, the market is ruled by the red and the green teams pursuing somewhat different strategies with respect to clock speed vs. parallelism. At this point we are not too concerned with nVidia, PhysX or Cuda - courtesy of their PR department - instead we are focusing on AMD’s latest and greatest product available as RADEON 4890 and/or RADEON 4890 OC with the moniker designating higher clock speed for core and memory. Most importantly, the RADEON 4890 will also be the last high end GPU released by AMD that is manufactured on a 55 nm process before the 4700 series based on a 40 nm design kicks in.

Intel today unveiled the first working processor based on the new 32nm P1268 process using immersion lithography on critical layers with 9 layers low-k copper interconnect. The new manufacturing process uses immersion only on some of the layers – described as critical – which comprise the actual NMOS and PMOS devices, whereas the interconnects are still done in a dry lithography process. The new processes P1268 (CPU) and P1269 (SOC) are yielding better than expected, allowing accelerated product ramping with an anticipated launch in Q4 2009 instead of Q1 2010.

A recent article in eWeek summarized the state of the personal computer industry as follows:

"The U.S. economic recession and global downturn did no favors for the x86 processor market, which faced a double-digit decline in the fourth quarter of 2008 as purchases of desktops, notebooks and enterprise server systems declined. Intel’s market share for the x86 processor market grew slightly on the strength of the Atom processor for mini-notebooks, netbooks and other devices, while AMD and Via’s portion of the market remained largely unchanged."

The economic slow down has fostered some interesting social trends, particularly the growing acceptance and popularization of bargain bins. Whereas ony last year, getting caught digging through the remnant section was totally uncool, bargain hunting now is not only socially acceptable but has shed the negative taste of avarice to become an expression of "street smartness". Running the risk that this may come across the wrong way, this is also becoming the primary business model in the semiconductor industry. High-end is out (maybe not quite so), mid range is just hanging in there and the bottom feeders are the ones that are generating the primary revenue stream. At least this picture is painted by about every analyst. Of course, this also begs the question, how much of the economic downturn has been inflicted by the analysts spreading panic and causing everybody to avoid spending money by all means – just to be on the save side.

This is also the environment that has fostered AMD's latest Socket AM3 offerings featuring a 938 pin configuration and smaller L3 cache or triple cores. Not to mention some 1200 MHz overclocking headroom using air cooling at room temperature.