Computers - AMD launches K8L alias K8-LAME and HD 3800 series

People often say "back in the days..." when they want to express their disappointment with situations nowadays.
Today, 20th November 2007, 1 day after the Phenom launch, AMD board members sit at their desk crying and saying just that: Back in the days when we only had double cores we could at least say the competition has twice the cores. But now we also have 4 and we are still getting butt-plugged.

1 year after the world was introduced to the first consumer oriented quad-core we get AMDs response in form of the Phenom models 9500 and 9600. 1 year that should enable any company in this world in any business field to come up with an at least somewhat decent counterpart. But we know that AMD tends not to do so as we already saw at the 2900 XT launch. And once again we are right: Doing more than 1 thing at the same is just too much for AMD; they cannot double core count, modificate their architecture and move to a smaller manufacturing process.

Let me summarize some of they key aspects of Phenoms competitiveness, since there are enough sites out there on which you can see benchmarks and tables.

- Phenom is more expensive than Q6600
- Phenom is heavily underperforming compared to Q6600 and cannot beat it even when overclocked
- Phenom is even slower than K8 (!) Yes, the newer CPU is slower than the older one
- Phenom consumes more power (double-digit difference)
- Phenom does not have to compete with Penryn yet, but it would not do so anyway
- Phenom is so heavily bugged, that AMD is forced to launch low speed bins

So all this leads to the following conclusions:

- Phenom is slower and less economical than the competitors lowest end quad-core
- Phenom would have cost no more than ~200 USD but it costs way more so nobody will buy it
- AMD has to slash Phenom prices to sell considerable amounts which would mean zero profit
- AMD is ultimatively inferior to Intel because now they do not even have a new CPU in sight
- The processor war that lasted 30 years in now finally over as AMD may drop out of CPU business


Now for the more positive part of this comment: Radeon HD 3800
AMD also launched its new Radeon HD 3800 GPU family these days. The models 3850 and 3870 are supposed to compete with the sledgehammer graphics card by nVidia, the 8800 GT.

The 3800 series really is not far behind since it managed to effectively make use of its 55nm process by offering decent clock speeds at sustainable power consumption and heat dissipation. A big plus is that it offers a much better feature set than the 2900 XT did while performing better, costing less, being less noisy, consuming MUCH less power and dissipating way less heat.

From an subjective AMD point of view the 3800 series is a huge success since it is a really huge improvement over the 2900 XT regarding literally everything.
But theres also an objective point of view and this one does include the 8800 GT. I already said that the 3870 is not too far behind but in the end, it is still behind. The card consumes a few watts more which is inacceptable when using a smaller process and having 88 million transistors less. It at least manages to perform on par with a stock 8800 GT when overclocked, OK, but people can overclock their 8800 GT as well.

In my opinion, AMD has a strong basis for the future with the HD 3800 series. The manufacturing process is pretty advanced at 55nm and the features are quite satisfactory. There is room for high-end cards based on the RV670 which should be able to compete with the 8800 GT on all fronts. AMD should advance on the RV670 core but at the moment, in the form of the 3850 & 3870, the GPU is not really competitive.