PC speed-freaks from across Europe will be pushing their processors to the limit in a series of extreme overclocking trials over the next month. The trials, which have been organised by AMD (NYSE:AMD), will see forum users from 19 leading technology forums from across the continent compete in a series of pedal-to-the-metal contests where they will attempt to push AMD platform technology, codenamed “Dragon,” to the fastest speed possible. During the trials, the contestants will try to clock up the highest scores in categories such as 3D Mark performance, calculation speed and highest CPU clock speed.(i)

The first of these events was held in London on Thursday 23rd April 2009, where sparks flew, literally! In this special event,eight teams of daredevil journalists went head to head in an attempt to break through the sonic wall in 3D Mark05 and CPU clock speeds. Things got so fast and so furious that sparks actually flew from one of the team’s “Dragon” rigs!(i)

It was a closely fought battle, but two winners emerged victorious. Clive Webster from Custom PC won the 3D Mark05 competition with a score of 24,689, while Tim Smally & Rich Swinburne from Bit-Tech won the CPU clock frequency competition with a speed of 4,211MHz. For this special opening event, both winning teams won a prize of $1000 each. The Custom PC donated their winnings to the Phyllis Tuckwell Hospice and the Bit-Tech team gave their winnings to the Myton Hamlet Hospice.
Video to the overclocking event in London: http://links.amd.com/OCUK

Core i7 920 at 2.66GHz that should be slower than Phenom II X4 955 in most of the cases is selling for $279.99 or €251 in Europe.

AMD admits that Core i7 940 and 965 are something it cannot compete with, but it advises customers to watch the price as Core i7 940 sells for $559.99, €480 in Europe and the king of the hill 3.2GHz Core i7 965 sells for massive $999.99 or €889 in Europe.

Nehalem, Core i7 Bloomfield generation is a great CPU, but its really overpriced especially since the infrastructure like motherboard and memory should cost an arm or leg.

Source:[fudzilla]

Performance

The Phenom II’s integrated memory controller and HyperTransport interface give it a technical edge over competing Core 2 Quad chips, which lack those features. Intel moved to an integrated memory controller and began incorporating its own version of HyperTransport–dubbed QuickPath Interconnect–only with its Core i7 platform. The integrated memory controller and HyperTransport interface allow Phenom II processors to achieve a higher memory bandwidth than Core 2 Quad processors can, by eliminating the bottlenecks created by a frontside bus and an external controller. The arrangement, in theory, improves system performance.

Availability and Phenom II Processor Pricing

Consumers can expect to see systems featuring Dragon platform technology from leading system builders and OEMs in the first quarter of 2009. In addition to Dragon platform technology-based offerings from AMD’s OEM partners, PC enthusiasts who enjoy building their own systems can search “Dragon” on popular e-tail sites such as newegg.com and tigerdirect.com to find special promotions on this new desktop PC platform.

In addition to Dragon platform technology, individual AMD Phenom II X4 processors will be available from AMD channel e-tailers at launch:

AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition processor – (3.0GHz) – $275 MSRP

AMD Phenom II X4 920 processor – (2.8GHz) – $235 MSRP

Intel platform features DP35DP motherboard, and AMD platform utilizes MSI K9A2 Platinum. The testing platforms both use HD3870 Graphic cards, Corsair CM2X1024-8500C5 1GX2 and Western Digital 1500ADFD.

Remark: the primary frequency of Intel Core 2 Quad 9400 is 2.66GHz, that of Q9300 is 2.50GHz, and AMD Phenom II is 3.00GHz.

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via xpreview.com

AMDs Taylor said the Phenom II demos conducted Thursday were done on what the chip maker is calling its “Dragon” platform — a quad-core Phenom II processor, ATI Radeon 4800 series discrete graphics and an AMD 790 chipset. Taylor said the processors shown were not hand-picked engineering parts, though he added, “But clearly they werent duds.”

“Its about high-speed path optimizations, how it does memory pre-fetch, how it does branch predictions, the larger cache. So youve got higher clock frequency per TDP, but at the same thermals,” he said.

“The result has been modest improvements on instruction per clock but much better clock frequency. Itll be the biggest step in processor improvement between generations that AMD has ever made, with the exception of leading the industry from single to dual-core.”

So who said the clockspeed battles are over? Over the past few years, weve heard quite a lot about how its not as important on multicore chips. But now that both Intel and AMD are really hitting their stride on successive generations of quad-core architectures, the new chips are coming out of the gate pretty darn fast.

Intel is hitting first with what it calls the “fastest processor on the planet” (with a lot of shared enthusiasm from reviewers, we should add) and the new Core i7 parts are, without a doubt, a major step-up in performance over the older Core 2 Quad chips. But AMD might just be about to drop some surprisingly powerful processors on the market as well.

“Phenom II is a big step up, too, but you dont have to open your wallet as wide to make that step up,” Taylor said.
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