The Zone

By now everyone should know that AMD has come out with new 'fixed' Phenoms starting with the X4 9850 at 2.5 GHz. Everyone should also know that the X4 Phenoms supposedly fix the TLB and L3 cache error which plagued the earlier 9500 and 9600 Phenoms. Practically anyone with an AMD press release can wax lyrical about the claims and apparent fixes, but we've managed to get our hands on one of these new fixed Phenoms, namely the X4 9850.

After several months of testing Phenoms with AMD boards we've kind of got used to the rather low PCMark05 score of about 4300 to 4600 that most boards powered by the old 9600 Phenom we had churned out. However, after testing the X4 9850 with a new AMD board we were quite gratified to get a more than reasonable score of more than 6000 which is on par to many of the better Intel boards we've seen so far. Granted, it doesn't reach the full performance of Intel's 3.0GHz processors with a good X48 motherboard, but the new 'fixed' Phenom performance now manages to deliver a much better performance than its TLB plagued predecessors.

The question is, will this new development be enough to turn things around for AMD? Or will it be too little too late because many of AMD's previous supporters and early adopters got burned quite badly with the lackadaisical performance from the non-fixed Phenoms which rather underwhelmed when it first came out. Now, its up to AMD to somehow perform with those that still stayed on. "Will it be enough?" is a question that AMD should seriously consider as there are now quite a few disgruntled users out there who still have some underperforming Phenoms on their boards. Perhaps AMD should also consider getting these users back, perhaps with a trade-in of the still under-performing 9600 and 9500 Phenoms for some fixed X4 Phenoms? Whether or not AMD would be able to do so considering their own rather shaky financials is something else, but it would definitely go a long way to setting things right with the AMD community.