AMD's "Agena" or Intel's "Kentsfield"?

AMD has just released its new Phenom processors. Honestly, I am disappointed that the performance of the new design cannot beat Intel's "Core" architecture.

The new Phenom perform slower than Intel's quad core offerings. AMD knows about the benchmark and it is proportionally priced under Core 2 Quad. They are of the same performance over price ratio. People may in general choose Intel's product as it is "considered" brighter. However, if I am asked to name a processor brand for a new computer, AMD will be my only choice. This is because, you may not believe it right away, AMD architecture is technological much more superior than Intel's Kentsfield.

AMD's "Agena" is a native quad core design while "Kentsfield" is a dual die chip in which two Conroes (Conroe is the codename for the first Core 2 Duo die) combined to form the quad core CPU. In fact, the dual-die configuration will not degrade the performance apparently. That's also the main reason why Intel can deliver the first quad core processor much sooner then AMD can. However, without further elaboration, you should see which one is more advanced idea.

In fact, it is not fair to compare "Agena" with "Kentsfield", because the real competitor is named "Penryn" which is a native quad core product from Intel. It is worth to make the idea clear that if we put it strict, AMD is the first vendor to release a native quad core processor for personal computing. Penryn in turns take advantage from Agena as a 45nm processor, while Agena is a 65nm product. The 45nm technology ensure a smaller die and less power consumption (if power leakage is well controlled)

While Intel has been leading the "nm" war for years, AMD made much revolutionary design ages ago. The Hyper Transport technology was developed by AMD years ago. It was quite an controversy technology that the effect on performance is hard to measure and existing benchmarking tools don't show a significant differentiation. However, in the latest Intel roadmap, QPI (QuickPath Interconnect) was introduced and basically it is an Intel's version of Hyper Transport. The Front Side Bus used by Intel will be fading out in a foreseeable time frame.

On the other hand, the "Nehalem" (in which QPI will be used) also features an integrated DRAM controller, which starts to become a tradition of AMD's processors. Integrated DRAM controller improve the latency of main memory, despite the lost in flexibility of migrating to new DRAM technologies (Redesign of processor core may be required to support new DRAM).

"Kentsfield" has higher performance then "Agena", but the successor of its successor ("Nehalem" is at least two generation after "Kentsfield") has two major changes that AMD's "Agena" is currently employing. If you view from this angle, AMD may be a better choice.