Lets sum this up, because from the comments there must be a huge supply of fanbois/grls on this forum:

1. Phenoms 1st in system cache and memory bandwidth

2. Phemon (No TLB) 9600 memory access beats all Intel chips

3. Phemon (No TLB) 9600 and Phemon ES (2.3 and 2.6) beat Q6600 in Worldbench Office

4. Phemon ES (2.6) beats X2 6400+ (3.2Ghz) in Worldbench Adobe

5. Phemon ES (2.6) beats Q6600 and X2 5600+ in Worldbench Firefox

6. Phemon ES (2.6) beats Q6600 and FX 74 in Worldbench Windows Media Encoder

7. Phemon ES (2.6) leads AMD's pack in Worldbench Winzip

8. Phemon ES (2.6) leads AMD's desktop processors in picCOLOR

9. Phemon ES (2.6) beats all other AMD Processors in Valve Source engine particle simulation

10. Phemon ES (2.6) beats all other AMD Processors in Valve VRAD map

11. Phemon ES (2.6) beats all other AMD Processors in Sisoft Sandra Multimedia Int x16

12. Phemon ES (2.6) beats all other AMD Processors in Sisoft Sandra Multimedia float pt x8

SO ... disapointments aside, the 2.6Ghz Phemon beats the Q6600 in four of the 12 benchmarks. In almost all the other tests it either defeats or comes very near defeating the entire Athlon X2 and FX processors currently available.

In most of the tests where the Phemon loses to the Q6600 it is very close. So close in fact it would be impossible to tell the diffrence between the two in real life useage.

Serveral sites including Legit Reviews where able to overclock the Phemons to over 2.7Ghz on stock voltages, and 3Ghz ( a little hot ) but that's with the stock cooler too.

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/597/12/

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=166792

So what's the problem? It's a better chip. It's faster then the chips their currently making. It can handle more threads. It has around the same overclocking range as existing Athlon x2s, and we'll be seeing updated and quicker versions in a few months along with Black and FX editions. Why all the bad press? These guys are obvious contenders their just having a real slow start. I don't plan on moving our Opteron farm to Intel for a 10% or even 30% performance diffrence. We're talking real world viable answers to upgrading hundreds of thousands of dollars in existing hardware. Why would you want to spend a couple hundred dollars more to replace a healthy AM2 rig for 10% or even 20%? I just don't get it? Maybe I'm just getting old.

I need a little help... apparently the lock-up i wrote about a few posts down is in fact my 7950gt becoming flaky, as it has occurred a second time now in window's desktop....

so my phenom 9500 is running folding@home 24/7 flawlessly, overclocked to 2.5ghz... i had already sent an email to MWave requesting a full refund on the phenom and they surprisingly obliged despite their policy clearly stating no returns on boxed retail processors (cudos MWave!)... i have 7 days to get the processor back to MWave, and I don't know what to do now.... replace the phenom with a 6400+ ($169 tigerdirect) or keep the phenom, any advice will help me decide (i make use of all 4 cores regularly by capturing full game videos with fraps and rendering the movies, among others)

what would u do in my position?

I have made a correction to the text of this article. Previously, it read:

---
AMD admitted the presence of the erratum prior to the Phenom's public introduction, but the firm's initial statements gave many the impression that the erratum affected only the 2.4GHz version of the Phenom, which it had decided to delay. In truth, all current Phenom variants have the bug, and systems with those processors will have to be patched and suffer the accompanying performance penalty.
---

Now, it reads:

----
AMD admitted the presence of the erratum prior to the Phenom's public introduction, but the firm's initial statements gave the impression that the erratum affected only virtualization, which is a server-class application and an uncommon use for a desktop CPU. In truth, the erratum can cause instability with desktop-style usage patterns, as well, and systems with Phenom 9500 and 9600 processors will have to be patched and suffer the accompanying performance penalty.
----

Please see here for more information:

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/13764

I remember those garbage Prescott space heaters pretty well.

But I don't seem to remember forum fanboys pushing to "buy the overheating, underperforming POS anyway because we need to support the company in their time of need."

You freakin people. You don't buy crappy products from a crappy manufacturer to keep the competition alive. If you do that your an idiot, and you have no idea what the definition of competition even means.

AMD came out with a horrible cpu, the phenom. And it sux. We all agree AMD took the wrong road somewhere and are currently taking a direct flight to extinction. You DO NOT help a company that is making bad products, If you do you are encouraging the existence of crappy cpus to remain on the market.

You pay for a cpu from a company that knows what they are doing. This way competitors (AMD) will have to learn to get their act together and finally learn how to make cpus before they go bankrupt.

Dont you guys even know what competition is? The good products survive, the shitty ones go to a landfill and then the drawingboard and hopefully end up as good products. Simple as that.

Incidentally, who are all you people?
I recognize like three names.

Just to lend some perspective on this Intel/AMD thing:

-Internationally, Intel currently has 3 separate unfair trade practice investigations going on. In Japan (JFTC), Intel didn't refute the charges and agreed to comply in the future, paying a small fine. The EU charged Intel as well, and Intel has asked for more time to answer. The answer is now due in Jan'08. Korea has yet to file their charges, but is collaborating with the EU and Japan and exchanging data.

-Intel has a history of rigging benchmarks as was discussed here in the last month or so. In one example, Intel rigged their compilers to detect an AMD processor, not utilize it's features, and return a worse result. The issue was exposed when a simple patch turned off the "AMD check", resulting in a much improved result for the AMD machine.

-Despite Intel outspending on research by a factor of ten, AMD has been the driver of most technical innovations in the last 8 years. 64bit support, integrated memory controllers, hypertransport connect system, native dual and quad core, power management, etc. INTC typically competes thru process and larger cache (brute force). The core2duo had some elegant design features, notably the shared cache, but most would agree the C2D was a response to AMD trouncing the P4 with it's Athlon 64.

While I'm the first to agree that AMD's execution has been anything but spotless, harping on AMD's mistakes, while ignoring the overwhelming evidence that Intel will us any tactic, legal or illegal to maintain it's monopoly is foolish.

More importantly, the end result of this media frenzy may be a return to an "Intel Only" market. I'm sure Intel will wait a respectable period of time before raising prices across the board, and throttling back it's R&D efforts, just to keep up appearances.

Plus

Shouldn't this warrant a recall, rather than a "patch that degrades performance." They advertised this chip, it doesn't perform as advertised, send me a working chip. If I bought a car and three of the four disc brakes worked, I'd expect them to replace the fourth brake with a disc brake, not a drum brake.

Ug terrible. Does AMD have a QA department anymore? Why release it if you know it's bad and further steep your name in mud? I was a huge AMD fan for the longest time and JUST as you think the entire "lol only hackers have amd / intel is better" stigma was wearing off, they're back at it.

/me takes a trip down barton 2500+ lane.

I've had the Phenom 9500 for just over a week now on an M2N-E mobo without the patch. I run folding@home 24/7 except while gaming. Believe it or not, while reading this article, my computer froze for the first time. I stared blankly at the screen for 2 minutes, somewhat intrigued, and watched 3 garbled lines appear within 2 minutes. I couldn't believe I was witnessing the bug first-hand while reading this article.

Granted, that was 1 crash in a week's worth of f@h and gaming with the likes of FSX (which stresses all 4 cores). The fact that it wasn't a complete freeze since graphical anomalies very slowly began covering the screen, showing that 2 cores are in a perpetual state of fighting one another for L3 real-estate... so what if it occurs during a write command to the harddisk?

I don't want the patch, i want a refund from MWave and a new 65nm 5600+. Better yet, I'll pair this mobo with a BE-2xxx and give to my brother for Christmas, and buy myself a QX6600+mobo.

The percentage differences in page 4 don't seem to match the scores (the bigger the difference, the more obvious this is).

The "good news" for AMD is that they don't have that many flawed Phenoms to sell. They will surely have to price them lower, and apparently the problem doesn't reproduce with 3 cores, so their upcoming 3-cores from this stepping will work okay.

It will surely cost them some, but not as much as many would think. AMD is better now, in real terms, than when they had the performance lead but no big OEMs were selling their chips. People are overreacting.

Is it just me, or does it seem that TR has been "piling on" to AMD's issues lately?

1º doesn’t the problem only arises with the 2.4Ghz versions?
How hard is to release the Phenom 9300 2.1Ghz and 9200 2.0Ghz.

2º Intel have a problem on their “outdated” south bridges, how about you guys check what’s going on there?
It also seams Ati “outdated” south bridges don’t have the problem.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3167

3º Nvidia Geforce 8800GTS 320MB problems update?
Is Nvidia still selling broken cards?
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/12993

4º Shouldn’t you guys instead be reviewing the MSI K9A2 Platinum (that I have already got more than a month ago) that is probably the best motherboard ever made for the best price ever, and the only review I have seen is from Poland.
http://www.in4.pl/recenzje.htm?rec_id=442&rectr_str_numer=1

5º How about you guys at thetechreport show and talk about the other guys mistakes and issues and don’t spend all the time talking about AMD mistakes?

6º Stupid things like the new Intel 1600FSB was more than enough to me to write two or more frontpage editorials bashing Intel for making the new X38 chipset outdated even before it is “fully” out…

Wow.
I will still buy one if the price is right, if for no other reason then to try and keep the competition alive.

Who else has been able to really compete with Intel the last 5-10 years when it comes to CPUs on the desktop?

Transmeta?
Via?
Motorola?
IBM?
Sun?

If somehow AMD does fail, and I do not think they will, is there anyone that can step up and provide a viable option with competitive performance on the desktop?

Just make sure you are getting the B3 stepping on these chips and you'll be fine. That is, when they release the B3 stepping.

That latency increase really sucks... AMD get your act together. 40ns increase in latency? Sheesh.

A 57.1% performance drop in Firefox. Youch!!

"Most users will want to wait until those new Phenom models are available before paying full price for a Phenom processor or a system based on one."

See that's the advantage from the fallout between techreport and AMD, that they now dare to say such truths.
Here's hoping they have a fallout with intel and other companies too :)

I would like to know how AMD ever started down this path. I mean somebody had to either lie or just not have any clue at AMD. It should have been obvious without the TLB erratum during early simulations that the Phelop (rhyme with flop) was not going to be competitive with the q6600 in any way. I mean I feel sure they had some type software simulation ability (well maybe).

I am not cutting them the same benefit of a doubt TR is. I don't see any way they should not have know they were inferior to start with... Intel had their parts out for over a year now and they new full well what the mark was in terms of IPC and ghz. Yet even with a large target painted on the wall at point blank range, they somehow aimed in the other direction. That just screams bad management, and a total disconnect with reality. Especially when coupled with the decision to ship the bad parts while furnishing modded ES procs for reviews and setting up nonrepresentative test systems for evaluation.

Yeah Phelop, Phlop, or dog call it by any name. It ain't worth what they are currently asking. I'll wait.

The word errata does not really mean bug as such, the word refers to the listing of (known) bugs, so it's more the description of the bugs than the bugs itself as it were.

Also when speaking about errata and the stability you might have mentioned that EVERY CPU has a list of bugs, even after several updates to the steppings, including the intel ones, like the math bug core2 has that when patched for greatly reduces its math speed, although generally a patch in applications is only needed for scientific/medical applications.
As it was put in the article it made it seem like only the phenom has an errata and that all other CPU's are rock stable and have no bugs that could affect it in such ways (reliability)

When I read the errata list of both intel and AMD CPU's I'm shocked by the bugs I must say, some are quite bad and have no workarounds, it's better to not know and just have your computer have some issue/crash with some program once every 2 months or so without knowing why I then think :/

Not that this TLB bug isn't a rather extreme one performance-wise, requiring special mention.

The 'extreme use' of RAM by FF is only extreme in the eyes of the beholder and dependant on settings and customer expectations.
If you want it to precache pages you are likely to go to and keep things in RAM to be speedy then yeah it uses a lot of RAM, but is that extreme? you have RAM for the exact purpose of speeding up and extending the use of applications.
And if you wish you can disable a lot of the functions that require the RAM and have lots of pointlessly unused RAM, and a slower browsing experience.

What I find extreme is the use of RAM by such things as mousedrivers, that could easily do with 1/100th of it and are always loaded.
Or 'shell extensions' that are useless often, and even when useful are so only 0.001% of the time you use the computer.

Thanks for the article Scott.. You answered alot of questions I had! Even though the news was bleek, and not what I had hoped for, I can still see some potential there...

I know it's totally foolish to buy a flawed chip, when you could get a Q6600 that would OC like crazy, but I still find myself wanting one...:)

If they would release an Unlocked Black Edition in the next few weeks for less than $300 I'd buy one, and a new 790FX Mobo to go with it....

If I could get it to run at 3/3/3/2.6, even with the patch it would still be fairly competitive, and if the patch turned out to be irrellevent to my apps, so I could safely turn it off..... ???

I'm feeling like the only person in the world who actually wants an Unlocked Phenom.... But I don't care... (hehe!)

People are acting like processor flaws and errors were something extraordinary.

Let's get this straight. The only news here is you can actually lock up the processor in normal operation (not so normal, but increasingly normal thanks to virtualization), with a significant probability of hanging the system without actually trying.

Intel's Core 2, for instance, has HUGE issues that have no OS work-around. It's perfectly possible to freeze it on purpose. http://download.intel.com/design/processor/specupdt/31327914.pdf

OpenBSD creator Theo de Raadt complains specifically about AI39, AI43, AI65, AI79, AI90 and AI99. "Part of exploitability is being able to crash a machine reliably," he said.

Even the original Pentium M, which is the least flawed of Intel's mobile processors, has several instances of deadlocks which are exploitable by anyone with enough time to write some specific assembly code.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/mobile/display/20030407062442.html

Intel just shrugged to these complains.

Processors are increasingly complex, and for the most part they're also more flawed than before. Not just design flaws, but actual goofs.

Amd would have been better off not mentioning any of this, and not issuing a patch. I doubt anyone running a desktop system would have noticed. There would have been a lot less complaining, that's for sure.

I have a Phenom 9500, and I don't think i'm ever gonna enable this patch. Chances are the errata will never manifest itself anyways....

It's not as bad as I expected. It basically takes a chip I wouldn't buy and turns it into a chip I wouldn't buy.

Interestingly, after filtering out the benches that I didn't consider to be worth a damn and then obtaining a new average, that average (12.46%) was very close to the original average.

The only bench that *REELY* matters to a person like myself is the Window Media Encoder but that's still essentially a 10% drop and not that far from the bench suite average either.

So the question is, what's 13% lamer than lame? AMD is up the creek until the get either a new architecture or a vastly improved mfg. process.

Thanks for the article TR.

So,... as I was saying, so long AMD, we knew you well.......

Poor bastards :/

One more big snag 'down the road' regarding the BIOS fix............

When the TLB problem is finally fixed and the 9x50 processors are readily available, if one is contemplating purchasing a motherboard then a wait for a motherboard with a BIOS compatible with the 9x50 versions would be very wise.( i.e a motherboard with the TLB BIOS 'fix' removed )...

The MB vendors have reportedly (and stupidly) not given the user the option in the BIOS settings to disable the fix. Why not? Just another non-default BIOS setting. I thoroughly distrust post-sale promises by MB vendors with regard to BIOS fixes. And there is always the risk of 'bricking' a motherboard with a user-initiated BIOS update.

It seems that AMD should stop ALL Phenom shipments right now to salvage their tattered reputation. No doubt bank and investor pressure is too great and AMD's spineless management has caved in. What can you expect from a company that was beating Intel at its own game until they indulged in the financial catastrophe of acquiring ATi. The huge debt load has played its part in diverting focus from AMD's core business and no doubt put pressure on AMD to rush Phenom and Barcelona to market and cut corners in fully testing the K10 design.

Sad, considering that I had jumped for the first time from Intel to AMD (X2) when I built my most recent personal high-end machine... the most stable PC that I have ever possessed. Now that I am contemplating a new personal high-end system-build, it seems sadly inevitable that I will have to jump back to Intel (Penryn).