The Core 2 Quad Q8400: Intel's $183 Phenom II 940 Competitor
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 7, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words
It took dual-core chips falling below $200 to start increasing their prevalence in the market, and today only one of our standard CPU tests won't see a performance increase from a dual core chip. I believe we're at the beginning of that same transition for quad-core CPUs. Many of our tests show a benefit from having four cores over two but in the next two years that should change significantly. The advent of GPU computing and the impending release of Larrabee will both bring about more focus on multi-threaded development. In the coming years a new group of applications that can run on both GPUs and multi-core CPUs will cement the transistion from applications that struggle to stress more than two cores to applications that scale to a virutally infinite number of cores.
The sheer affordability of quad-core processors today is impressive; $180 - $190 will buy you a Core 2 Quad Q8400 (2.66GHz/4MB L2), a Core 2 Duo E8500 (3.16GHz/6MB L2) or a Phenom II X4 940 (3.0GHz). Whether you go dual or quad is really a personal choice depending on the types of apps you run. If you look at our SYSMark 2007 results you’ll see that the E8500 is a better choice overall. Personally I’d opt for the quad core but that’s because when I’m most performance constrained it’s in applications that scale well to four cores, but if you don't do any 3D rendering or video encoding (or heavy multitasking between two multithreaded apps) then a fast dual-core may make the most sense for you today. If you're buying for a system that you plan on keeping for 3 - 5 years however, I suspect that quad-core is the way to go.
Between the Q8400 and the Phenom II X4 940, at stock clock speeds, the 940 is the way to go unless you're very concerned about power consumption or happen to be running applications that are very well optimized for Intel's Core architecture. Update #2: Intel has just confirmed that the Core 2 Quad Q8400 does support Intel's VT-x from the start, so the update below is incorrect. The Q8300, E5400, E5300, E7500 and E7400 will also end up transitioning to versions with VT-x support as well but only the Q8400 supports it from launch. Update: As many readers have pointed out, the Q8400 does not support Intel's VT for hardware accelerated virtualization. Honestly it's silly that Intel is attempting to use VT as a profit driver at this point. Not supporting VT on any quad-core CPU just doesn't make sense. The Phenom does support AMD's hardware virtualization AMD-V, and thus gives it a tremendous leg up if you care about the feature.
If you plan on doing some light overclocking, the Q8400 has more inherent potential. Start bumping up core voltages and the Phenom II X4 940 regains strength as it's able to increase the clock speed advantage once more. Throw overclocking into the mix and the comparison isn't quite as clean cut, both AMD and Intel trade blows in their advantages. I'd say AMD would probably have more wins in our applications but at the expense of much greater power consumption.
It's good to see that there's competition here, but Intel's profit margin advantage on the Q8400 is ridiculous. AMD has to sell something Nehalem sized for under $200 to remain relevant today. I'm far less concerned about who pulls ahead while overclocked and far more concerned about AMD's health at the end of all of this. Maybe the right way of looking at this isn't by talking about a 6% performance advantage, but instead talking about whether or not you want there to be a real competitor to Intel in the future. Maybe the Phenom II X4 940 should get the win here just to ensure we have an AMD to talk about in a couple of years...
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eXistenZ - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link
Obviously, AMD is no good in Far Cry 2 game. K8, K10, K10.5, al these architectures were always slower than intel's competitors. And it is really crappy game, so i don't see any reason why are you testing right on this one. I think, more fair testing is with Crysis or CPU-eaters = RTS...Goty - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link
Anand seems to be buying into all the FUD about AMD lately. Sure, AMD's not doing so hot right now, but they're not in much worse a position than they were in the middle of the P4 era (probably about the same position, all told).Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, May 8, 2009 - link
I'm not sure I would call it FUD. AMD lost $2.36B before taxes in the last four quarters combined. Their chief competitor made $6.13B. Now Intel has always made more than AMD, but the issue now is that AMD is losing a considerable amount every quarter. That can only continue for so long.What I'm more worried about is the impact this is having on the next-generation cores that AMD is developing. While engineering budgets are the last things to go, if you're losing a few hundred million a quarter everyone from marketing to engineering gets hurt.
Ignoring the problem isn't going to make it go away, I felt that it would be important to at least bring some of this stuff to the table so we can at least be thinking about it.
Take care,
Anand
microAmp - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link
Actually, it's worse, they are running out of cash.ssj4Gogeta - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link
"It's the beauty of Moore's Law: with fewer transistors crammed into a much smaller area, we're able to see the same performance."Shouldn't it be "MORE transistors crammed into a much smaller area"?
:)
hooflung - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link
I am another that buys based on the ability of Virtualization via virt functionality. I got a P2 940 because I wanted the ability to have 4 cores to split up to VM's running Hyper-V, Xen and KVM. I just can't do that on new intel chips that fall in the price range right now.My C2D is still rocking a venerable 1ghz OC on a e4300 and P35 chipset. For me to install an OS to do development as the top level is just wasting wattages at my home.
snakeoil - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link
''Phenom II Earns a Financially Troubled AMD Less per Chip than Core 2 Quad''well you are saying that amd make less money because phenom 2 has a little more area,but in your happy calculations you forgot that bad quad core dies are used to make tricores and soon dual cores phenoms.
harvesting.
what are you doing little annand
crimson117 - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link
One wafer costs a fixed amount to make; let's say $200.Let's say AMD can get 10 CPUs made from each wafer, while intel can get 20 smaller CPUs from each wafer. They each sell their chips for $180.
AMD puts $200/10 = $20 worth of wafer into each $180 CPU.
Intel only has to put in $200/20 = $10 worth of wafer into each $180 CPU.
So assuming all other things are equal, Intel makes $5 more on each CPU sale than AMD.
crimson117 - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link
*clicks Edit button*So assuming all other things are equal, Intel makes $10 more on each CPU sale than AMD.
mkruer - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link
You are also forgetting that AMD and Intel use two different lithphogathy technologies to AMD uses submersion and Intel uses double pattering. The Submersion takes slightly longer then a single pattering, and yeild fewer defects. This meas that AMD should be able to preduce a high volume of chips per platter then Intel. Adding to the confusion, is that neiter intel nor AMD releases what there yeilds are and as such, too comepare based upon die size alone is folly. People can crunch the numbers anyway they want, but in the end it should be a, for more or less, wash.