AMD’s Phenom has so far had a short but eventful life – starting from its debut November of last year, it has encountered a poor response from enthusiasts due to its performance delta compared to Intel Core 2 series of processors, had to pull out higher-clocked Phenoms in favor of the underwhelming 9600 and 9500s, and finally had to contend with the TLB (Translation Lookaside Buffer) and L3 cache error that was giving fits to the benchmarking community with system crashes and an early BIOS fix that brought down performance by a large amount.

                                             The fixed, B3 revision Phenom X4 9850.
 

Now, it’s the end of the first quarter and as promised, AMD has come out with the revised silicon for a non – TLB error processor, namely the Phenom X4 9850, B3 revision. With this revision, the TLB and cache error has been fixed, resulting in a processor that should have been released four months ago and compete with the likes of the Intel Q6600. Along with this highest-speed Phenom, AMD has also decided to release a number of triple core and low-power quad core silicon along with the lower clocked Phenom X4s that were affected by the bug. We will concentrate on the 9850, the best AMD has to offer at the moment.

                                             The packaging is for AM2+ boards, although the older AM2 will still be compatible.

The X4 9850 Black edition runs at 2.5GHz, making it the highest clocked AMD processor currently available for purchase. Since it is a member of the Black edition, its multiplier is unlocked for a broader set of options and tweaks that can be used when reaching for that overclock. 2MB total L2 cache (512KB per core) and a large 2MB L3 perform caching duties, and a notable feature is the 9850’s 2GHz Memory Controller Frequency, translating into a full 4000MHz Hyper Transport line dual-pumped. This processor supports DDR2 memory – DDR3 support is slated for AMD’s upcoming 45nm process chips. The 9850 is packaged in the same way as all recent Phenoms – AM2+, 940-pin chips which are still backward compatible with the AM2 standard. Note that the naming convention is a means to identify this product from the older, planned higher-clocked processors that were pulled out – the 9800 was replaced by the 9850, and so on.

                                             Price listings of recently released Phenoms by AMD.

Of special note is the listed price of this top-end processor – in 1000 unit batches, it costs a measly $235 (arount P9800!). As it trickles down to local retail channels, this price will naturally be a bit higher than batch pricing, but this is still a good price for AMD’s top=of-the-line processor. This lines up well with Intel’s currently available Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 retailing for a somewhat higher price of $280 average (P11600 thereabouts). The Q6600 runs at 2.4GHz, again a good match to the Phenom 9850’s 2.5, while its memory speed is at the current standard of 1066MHz for DDR3 – compared to the 9850’s 800MHz DDR2 support (nominal).

Multiple benchmarks have been performed on the 9850, and in most tests it is in a dead heat with Intel’s Q6600, although it loses out to the QX6850 and other higher processors. Then again said processor usually costs more than a thousand dollars and runs at 3.0GHz. In addition to its list price, the 9850 will have the advantage of being able to support the ubiquitous DDR2 standard, which is quite cheap at the moment. The fact that it is AM2 compatible and can be dropped into an older AMD board doesn’t hurt either – this processor will give users on a limited budget a big, wide upgrade path when and if the time comes to upgrade.

                                             A sample benchmark. Thanks to HotHardware!

The Phenom X4 9850 uses the 65nm process, and since it arrived quite late to the processor wars, it’s only a matter of time before its main Penryn rival in the Intel camp get updated to the 45nm Yorkfield process. While the 9850 is certainly not the fastest chip available, its price advantage, easy upgrade path, and “true” quad core architecture will find it in good stead when it comes time to springboard from this late, but successful AMD release to new and more powerful processors that will compete with Intel at the highest end of the processor scale. The Phenom is officially back on track, and AMD simply needs to keep going to start giving Intel some very serious competition.