Well we are now at the beginning of 2008 and I have to say, where the hell did last year go? Actually, I bet AMD/ATI are asking themselves exactly the same question. Although they did manage to release the Radeon HD 2900XT earlier in the year, it was still some 6 months behind the GeForce 8800 GTX. Then finishing off the year they also managed to sneak out the Radeon HD 3850 and 3870 graphics cards. Although the Radeon series really struggled to flourish in 2007, as it had in previous years, it was the AMD processor series that we felt was the biggest let down.

This is because we waited patiently until mid-November 2007 for AMD to finally release the highly anticipated Phenom processor series, their answer to the Core 2 series, which had been available for almost a year and a half at this point. So then, by this stage, we were keen to check out the quad-core Phenom 9500 and 9600 processors, though not everything went to plan and I am sure AMD would agree.

A word we hear very little of when discussing computer hardware is “Erratum”, though this is a word that has been heavily associated with the new AMD Phenom processors. This is because there is a hardware bug present in current Phenom processors which can cause problems in instances where software uses nested memory pages. AMD has come up with a short term solution that they call a “TLB patch” which effectively disables the 2MB L3 cache. While this does avoid any potential problems, it also further cripples performance, which is not something the current Phenom processors can afford to forfeit at this stage.

The TLB erratum is said to be fixed in the B3 stepping of all AMD quad-core processors, which will include both Phenom and Barcelona processors. The only problem here is that AMD fans will have to wait until March 2008 before the B3 stepping processors will become available. Processors shipped between then and now will still carry the TLB bug, though with the BIOS workaround these machines will not experience a lockup but will suffer a performance loss. Therefore it is clear the Phenom launch has been far from perfect, but we like to think some good has come out of all this.

The Phenom 9500 began life at $251 while the Phenom 9600 targeted $283, but because of all these problems AMD has reduced the pricing to $199 for the Phenom 9500 and $245 for the Phenom 9600. Furthermore the AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ processor has just recently dropped from the $220 price tag set by AMD in November, to just $190. What we also now have is a range of new and impressive AM2+ motherboards supporting both AMD Athlon 64 and Phenom processors.

Rather than use an engineer sample provided by AMD, we have just recently gone out and purchased a Phenom 9500 processor locally. This processor will be tested on the new ASUS M3A32-MVP Deluxe using the latest BIOS revision. Furthermore we have decided to do things a little differently for this article. Normally we would just look to compare this processor to the Core 2 Quad Q6600 and probably a 2.66-3.00GHz Core 2 Duo processor. However, we have found that the Core 2 Quad which runs at 2.4GHz, tends to easily defeat the Phenom 9500 in some tests while not so much in others. Therefore, by removing the MHz factor we can now paint a clearer picture of how the Phenom architecture compares to the Core 2 architecture.