Its a classic Hollywood script- AMD, the underdog, came out of nowhere with the Athlon64 and captured the hearts of the enthusiast and a reasonable market share from the 800lbs gorilla that Intel is. Not only did AMD do well on the desktop but even their server based Opteron CPU started eroding Intel's Xeon's market share. Unfortunately it wasnt a "Happily Ever After" ending for AMD once the Core 2 was released by Intel over a year go. The Core 2 CPU started taking back the market share AMD had advanced upon during its hay days. All eyes now rested on AMD's Phenom CPU, however, as you've already read in many websites, its too little too late. Lets look at the CPUID screenshot for it.

What you see from the above screenshot is AMD's first 65nm based Quad-Core desktop CPU. Although you're looking at the 2.3GHz based Phenom 9600, we have also tested the 2.4GHz based Phenom 9700. This was an Engineering Sample and CPUID could not correctl identify it, which is why you dont see its screenshot. These new CPUs support SSE4A as well as 64-bit instructions and AMD Virtualization.

Like the original Athlon64 X2 design, the Phenom is a true quad core CPU unlike Intel's current desktop line which basically has two dual core packages stuck together. Intel also did this with their desktop dual core CPU- the Pentium D and AMD likes to brag about their native solution whenever they get a chance. You can also see a 4 x 512k L2 cache for each of the cores and on top of it a 2MB cache shared by all four cores.

The Phenom uses an AM2+ packaging which is pin compatible with the original AM2 packaging. Its nice to see AMD stick to the same pin layout with the Phenom- many people had complained when AMD released the short lived 754 pin original Athlon64 CPU which was followed by 939 and then eventually AM2. What this means is that you can plug a Phenom into any current AM2 motherboard and expect it to work at full speed. What you will not get is independant voltage controls for each core and access to a few other tweaking tools.

We decided to compare the two Phenom CPUs to Intel's Q6600 CPU which is also a Quad-Core CPU and runs at 2.4GHz. The price of Q6600 is $280 which alightly higher than the 2.3GHz Phenom 9600 which is selling for US$ 240/- The Phenom 9700 which is a 2.4GHz product should run for under $300.