AMD 'Stars' Models Unveiled

DailyTech has a graph posted today that shows all the different AMD Phenom processor model names, speeds, cores, availability and so on. Phenom FX chips will be clocked between 2.2GHz and 2.6GHz and will fit into the same 1207-pin F sockets as existing Athlon 64 FX-70-series chips, although AMD will reportedly also introduce a Socket AM2 Phenom FX clocked at 2.2-2.4GHz.

As for the Phenom X4s, there will be two of those chips clocked at 2.2GHz and 2.4GHz and with 89W power envelopes. In the fourth quarter of this year, DailyTech says AMD will introduce dual-core Phenom X2 processors clocked at 2.4GHz, 2.6GHz, and 2.8GHz. Much like Phenom FX and Phenom X4 chips, the Phenom X2s will have 512KB of L2 cache per core and 2MB of shared L3 cache per chip. Finally, in the first quarter of next year, AMD will reportedly launch low-power Phenom X2 processors clocked at 1.9-2.3GHz as well as budget Athlon 64 X2 and Sempron processors clocked at 2.2-2.4GHz. Those budget chips will be based on AMD's new architecture, but they will have the same number of cores as their existing namesakes, and they will lack any shared L3 cache.

XP vs. Vista - A Tale of Framerates

Before you upgrade your Windows XP system to Windows Vista or replace it with a new Vista system, it would be helpful to know how your upgraded or new machine's DX9 gaming performance will compare with that of your current XP-based model. The chaps over at HardOCP have pit Windows XP versus Windows Vista in an all out gaming framerate comparison. If you are a gamer contemplating the upgrade, you seriously need to read this article. Here's an excerpt:

As you can see, some games fared better than others with the new OS. For some titles, especially Company of Heroes and Need for Speed, we saw dramatic framerate discrepancies. What's more, both of these titles have recently released patches! Other titles showed a slight, but essentially negligible difference, such as BF2142, World of Warcraft, and Prey. Really, there was only one instance where Vista was able to pick up a few more frames than XP - World of Warcraft at greater than 90fps, where the human eye can't even see the difference. To see this overall trend against Vista is very interesting and makes us wonder as to the cause.

We wanted to look at image quality because we were interested in how the games actually "looked" as much as we were interested in how they "performed." This is something that hasn't been looked at much critically, and, it appears, for good reason. Between the implementation of the same graphics driver on the two OSes, we found that was no difference in the appearance of the game.

This article is not to slam Vista and label it as a poor gaming operating system. However, we will say that at the current time, gaming is not what it could be on Vista. Given all of the variables, it's hard to dismiss the fact that Vista is the common denominator. Many (including us) have pointed at poor driver support being the Achilles heel of Windows Vista. In this case, we used two different graphics drivers and got essentially the same results: worse performance in Vista. If we then say, "Okay, maybe it's not the graphics drivers," then at what else do we point the finger? Chipset drivers? Hard drive access? RAM? Though we've seen upgraded chipset drivers improve system stability, it's rare that we see it improve gaming performance.

In the end, it looks like the the new, bulky, poorly supported operating system is at the root of it all. This is not to say that this is a final verdict. If Microsoft keeps to its pattern, we can expect a service pack that may do some Spring cleaning with the OS and improve its ability to support better performance in games. We think that we'll also see more driver and patch revisions from graphics chipset designers and game publishers.