Introduction

I’ve been writing about technology for 10 years now, and as a member of the press, I find that it’s incredibly difficult to always “keep your mind right” when it comes to passing judgment over the hardware that people buy. Anyone who does this job and says otherwise is lying.

Showdowns between AMD and Intel are especially difficult to officiate because the two companies are continually adjusting their price tags according to relative performance. I can tell you that Intel’s fastest chip will smoke AMD’s best effort, but the $800 discrepancy is a big enough turn-off to keep enthusiasts from automatically jumping on Intel’s flagship. However, once you start comparing one company’s $250 quad-core chip against the other’s, decisions get a lot trickier. After all, in a bid to make some money and still remain competitive, both organizations are going to give you a very similar experience.

But at the end of the day, you’re still faced with a choice. Your system is getting old. The latest games just don’t look the way you know they should. So you want to build a new machine with the best processor, platform, memory, and graphics subsystems your money can buy. Make the call: AMD or Intel?

Up until now, at that $250 price point, I would have steered friends, family, and readers toward the Intel solution. I’m a big advocate of the platform, and when I can put an Intel processor on a motherboard with an Intel chipset, things just seem to work. The 45m quad-core Yorkfields and dual-core Wolfdales are started to appear, and they’re shaping up to be highly scalable chips. Not helping the situation is AMD’s limited quad-core lineup. Based on a B2 stepping sullied by an errata that, when patched, absolutely hammers performance, the Phenom wasn’t altogether attractive.

You can tell it's a B3 by simply looking at the OPN code

AMD’s counter-point is that today’s Phenom is a drop-in upgrade for the folks out there already on AM2 motherboards. In addition, the least expensive Phenom costs less than the least expensive Core 2 Quad. So, if you’re on a strict budget or simply upgrading an older machine, Phenom makes sense. If that’s the case, you’re probably not all that concerned with how AMD’s quad-core solution stacks up to Intel’s competing chips anyway.

Of course, AMD has the platform story on its side now. In fact, its 790FX chipset is one of the most feature-complete enthusiast foundations selling today. What the company needs is a hardware fix for its cache issue and more megahertz. And that’s exactly what the B3 stepping brings to AMD’s Phenom.

Fixing Phenom

We laid it out in our last Phenom story and I’ll reiterate here: though you’ll find plenty of editorial content online explaining what the TLB erratum is and how it’s triggered, there’s a good chance you’d never encounter it if you bought a Phenom that centered on AMD’s B2 stepping. With that said, the prospect of data corruption is real enough that most motherboard vendors have issued BIOS updates with a selectable workaround. The patch greatly increases memory latency and significantly impacts Phenom’s performance.

Stepping B3 takes a different approach to the problem, which doesn’t affect performance, and the erratum is sidestepped entirely.

Representatives at AMD insist that the purpose of B3 is to fix the cache bug, so don’t go assuming it was also trying to boost Phenom’s scalability this time around. The company emphatically insists that what you see is what you get when it comes to overclocking the quad-core processor. And more importantly, you still void your warranty. Considering the apparent scalability of Intel’s dual-core Wolfdale chips (we took our 3.16 GHz sample past 4 GHz), we’re really hoping that AMD can build some more headroom into the architecture.

Overclocking is neither here nor there, though. We asked for a TLB fix and more clock speed. B3 delivers on that first wish.