Phenom vs Phenom II? What are the differences?

[Monkey_Business]

As far as I know, the Phenom II is a Phenom with a shrunken die, and a few other minor improvements including higher clock speeds. Approximately how much faster (in percentages) is a Phenom II X4 965 BE when comparing it to a Phenom X4 9950 BE? The Phenom CPU's were a huge flop according to what I've read. Not even matching performance with mid-range Core 2 Quads. Someone on a forum said that a Phenom X4 9950 will give you about half the performance of a mid-range Core 2 Quad.

What improvements were made to the Phenom II processors?

 

[Ben90]

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/default.aspx?p=21&p2=102&c=1

The major improvement included: making them not suck

*EDIT*

I can't find a huge list of changes between the processors, but the beginning few pages of this article explain it a little bit.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3492
It seems going from 2mb->6mb cache helped a lot along with a few other tweaks

 

[IntelUser2000]

Per clock, it was like from Conroe to Penryn: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/default.aspx?p=21&p2=85&c=1

Major advancement of Phenom II was ability to increase clock speeds. Faster L3 caches, 3x greater L3 capacity, fixed TLB bug, slightly better memory performance and prefetchers.

 

[Monkey_Business]

Per clock, it was like from Conroe to Penryn: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/default.aspx?p=21&p2=85&c=1

Major advancement of Phenom II was ability to increase clock speeds. Faster L3 caches, 3x greater L3 capacity, fixed TLB bug, slightly better memory performance and prefetchers.

Those charts show a Phenom II X4 965 is slightly faster than a C2Q Q9400 both at stock speeds. I'd imagine combined with higher clocked, DDR3 RAM, it would be even faster.

That's a very useful and informative chart. Are there any charts like that comparing GPU's?

 

[Maximilian]

Didnt they also overhaul the power management in phenom II since the original phenoms power management thing never actually worked like it was supposed too?

 

[ShawnD1]

As far as I know, the Phenom II is a Phenom with a shrunken die, and a few other minor improvements including higher clock speeds. Approximately how much faster (in percentages) is a Phenom II X4 965 BE when comparing it to a Phenom X4 9950 BE? The Phenom CPU's were a huge flop according to what I've read.

The OG Phenoms are good processors but they lack flexibility. They basically can't be overclocked much at stock voltage, nor can they be undervolted without dropping the speed. They also consume a lot of power.

The Phenom II is more flexible. At stock speed, the voltage can be lowered by quite a bit. At stock voltage, they can overclocked quite a bit. The Phenom II hits an overclocking wall around 4GHz whereas the original Phenom hits the wall at about 3GHz.

Original Phenoms were excellent budget chips until the Athlon II came out. Now they're just garbage. An Athlon II 620 quad core has the same speed and cost as the old Phenoms, but the power consumption is cut in half.
Athlon II = good budget chip
Phenom II = good mid-range chip
Phenom original = antiquated shit

 

[StrangerGuy]

The original Phenom was hot, inefficient and the worst part is it can barely break a 3GHz OC. Add in the notorious TLB bug and 4GHz Wolfdales, and it becomes very, very unattractive.

 

[ShawnD1]

The original Phenom was hot, inefficient and the worst part is it can barely break a 3GHz OC. Add in the notorious TLB bug and 4GHz Wolfdales, and it becomes very, very unattractive.

They're pretty fast though. I did a quick benchmark to see how an overclocked E6600 compares with an overclocked Phenom 9600. Using 7-zip's CPU benchmarking tool:
E6600 @ 2800MHz - 3827 MIPS
Phenom 9600 @ 2600MHz - 8528 MIPS

Sucks for games due to the lack of cache but it does well in most benchmarks. Power consumption is a huge negative, though.

 

[Drakula]

Didnt they also overhaul the power management in phenom II since the original phenoms power management thing never actually worked like it was supposed too?

They did. Originally, Phenom was designed to shut off other cores and leave one when idle. As workload becomes more intense, other cores will be awaken. It was good idea, but I remember the performance is not good due to Windows power management not able to handle it efficiently without performance problem.

Honestly, AMD's initial Phenom approach is more elegant, but unfortunately the current task scheduling mechanism causes problems. The other issue is that Phenom wasn't switching core speeds quickly enough; ideally it shouldn't matter that a high-priority thread got bounced to a new core, as the new core should simply scale up to full speed in a fraction of a second. Regardless, Phenom II addresses the issues with Phenom CnQ performance not being where it should be.

Phenom II redesigned the power management to work similar to previous Athlons. Anand's article explained it in the top three paragraphs.

 

[douglasb]

I couldn't squeeze an extra 100 stinkin' MHz out of my old Phenom 9500. So I'd say the overclocking wall would be more around "within 100-200 MHz of stock" rather than 3 GHz, realistically speaking. I've seen WAY more Phenoms that didn't OC at all than ones that reached 3 GHz.

 

[LoneNinja]

All the people bringing the TLB bug up, Phenom II didn't fix that, a new stepping on the original Phenom fixed that. Any Phenom with XX50 for a name was B3 stepping and fixed the TLB and improved overclocking over the first batch of XX00 Phenoms.

Key differences between Phenom and Phenom II is the amount of L3 cache, die size, power consumption, and overclocking head room. A Phenom usually tops out around 3.0Ghz on an ACC supported motherboard, and lower without ACC, while Phenom II can usually reach close to 4.0Ghz.

I bought a Phenom 9850 last year when Phenom II launched, got the Phenom for $130 while the Phenom II 940 was still around $270, thought it was a good bargan than, but since the release of Athlon II X4 there is no reason to purchase a Phenom again.

 

[ShawnD1]

I couldn't squeeze an extra 100 stinkin' MHz out of my old Phenom 9500. So I'd say the overclocking wall would be more around "within 100-200 MHz of stock" rather than 3 GHz, realistically speaking. I've seen WAY more Phenoms that didn't OC at all than ones that reached 3 GHz.

You can only OC them by changing the multiplier. Changing the FSB from 200 to 201 will make them crash, but changing the multiplier from 11.5 to 13 works fine.

 

[IntelUser2000]

All the people bringing the TLB bug up, Phenom II didn't fix that, a new stepping on the original Phenom fixed that. Any Phenom with XX50 for a name was B3 stepping and fixed the TLB and improved overclocking over the first batch of XX00 Phenoms.

I stand corrected. The TLB bug was indeed fixed with later revisions of Phenom chips. Phenom II had minor architecture changes which probably impacted performance by 1-2%, but main improvement is related to cache, and even more importantly, ability to scale clock speeds up.

 

[f4phantom2500]

I stand corrected. The TLB bug was indeed fixed with later revisions of Phenom chips. Phenom II had minor architecture changes which probably impacted performance by 1-2%, but main improvement is related to cache, and even more importantly, ability to scale clock speeds up.

How can that be true? Aren't the Athlon II's essentially Phenom II's without any level 3 cache? If that were the case, wouldn't an Athlon II lose out to a Phenom at the same clock speed (assuming they have the same number of cores)? Unless I'm mistaken, this is not the case.

 

[IntelUser2000]

Well it does, somewhat: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/default.aspx?p=21&p2=106&c=1

The cache size increases probably did something like 3-4%, with rest being on the improvement of the architecture like lower latency cache, better memory system, and things like prefetchers, for final of 8-9% in average.

Phenom II compared to Penryn faired similar to Phenom 9xxx vs. Conroe and Kentsfield: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/default.aspx?p=85&p2=76&c=1

Which means the improvements that Phenom II had(including the L3 cache capacity changes) were similar to what Penryn had over Conroe, if not slightly better. Lack of L3 cache did not drop performance too much, though that made the Athlon II's slower than original Phenoms.

 

[Tab]

On the subject, is there any reason I should get a Phenom II over a Athlon II? I use my computer primarily for games, and it doesn't seem likes there a whole lot of difference between the two looking at game performance.

 

[konakona]

I think you would be fine with either one, but if you can get PhII real cheap (fry's?), I don't think it would hurt to pay a lil extra.

 

[Tab]

I think you would be fine with either one, but if you can get PhII real cheap (fry's?), I don't think it would hurt to pay a lil extra.

No Fry's here

 

[heyheybooboo]

On the subject, is there any reason I should get a Phenom II over a Athlon II? I use my computer primarily for games, and it doesn't seem likes there a whole lot of difference between the two looking at game performance.

The L3 cache on the PhII seems to provide a tidy boost to gaming ...




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[Tab]

The L3 cache on the PhII seems to provide a tidy boost to gaming ...
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Looking at the benchmarks on AnAnd it doesn't seem like there's a big difference.

 

[f4phantom2500]

Well it does, somewhat: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/default.aspx?p=21&p2=106&c=1

Most of those that aren't SYSMark slightly favor the Athlon II.

 

[Markfw]

Most of those that aren't SYSMark slightly favor the Athlon II.

Thats Phenom I vs Athlon II. If you look at Phenom II, it beats the Athlon II, in games its a fair bit faster.

 

[konakona]

Looking at the benchmarks on AnAnd it doesn't seem like there's a big difference.

I hear the gap grows a bit larger when OC'ing (especially the CPU NB) is involved, but I am too lazy to actually read those articles

 

[Fox5]

The Phenom II has faster L2 and L3 than Phenom I iirc. That means the Athlon II has faster L2 than the Phenom I, perhaps mostly negating the lack of L3.

 

[GaiaHunter]

Looking at the benchmarks on AnAnd it doesn't seem like there's a big difference.

Well it is between 10-20% (look at the Phenom II 940 3GHz vs Athlon II 635 2.9 GHz http://www.anandtech.com/bench/default.aspx?p=80&p2=122&c=1)

Seems huge, but then you notice one plays at 40 FPS and the other at 48 FPS (worst case) or one plays at 78 FPS and the other at 82 FPS.

And of course, at higher resolutions/higher IQ setting the difference won't be as noticeable.

Then again, in 2 years those Phenom II might still rock the newer games and people with Athlon II will need to change.