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.