Counter-'tock:' AMD fires back at Intel with everything it's got

Betting everything on bettering the bottom line

Compared to AMD's Agena design for last year's Phenom, the Phenom II set will enable more instructions processed per clock cycle, will finally ramp speed up to 3.0 GHz for the Black Edition, raises the total on-chip cache from 4 MB to 8 MB, and finally makes the move AMD said not long ago was premature for Intel: support for DDR3 memory. Phenom II X4 can be dropped, however, onto processors that use DDR2, so it's still a candidate for an upgrade from Spider.

During a recent analysts' conference, Intel executives were heard to say that statistics may show there aren't as many enthusiasts in this market today as there were in prior years. "If you define 'enthusiast' as someone willing to spend $1,000 on a Core i7 processor, then I'd have to agree with them," stated Solotko with a swagger. "Phenom's not at that price."

The magic platform price barrier here is $1,000, and it's not fair if AMD stops at $999.99. Its plan is to release the 2.8 GHz Phenom II X4 920 at $235 suggested retail -- which is $16 less than the entry-level processor for Spider. By the time you put all the parts together, including the ATI card, AMD promises customers their final tab should not exceed $900 at the entry level.

By AMD's estimate, the basic Intel Core i7 platform would end up costing customers about $250 more. Upgrade that i7 to something that's performance-compatible with X4, and customers may be spending $900 more.

"With 790GX base platforms, you can buy a motherboard for about $135 that has all of the capabilities of AMD OverDrive performance tuning and multi-GPU support; and with an AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition, you'll have the unlocked control and the massive headroom of a state-of-the-art processor," stated AMD's desktop division director. Plus, he added, "The ATI Radeon HD 4000-series graphics cards are renowned for their energy efficiency. They're manufactured on a state-of-the-art process, they have tremendously low power requirements, such that we were able to offer the 4870X2 -- two GPUs on a single card -- and still with a very reasonable power threshold for an enthusiast card."

The X4 940 Black Edition is the "lights out" CPU AMD's been wanting to build for almost two years: a 3.0 GHz quad-core, at long last. It will sell for a suggested price of $275. Compare that to a Core i7 940 at 2.93 GHz. Granted, it's AMD at 45 nm versus Intel at 32 nm. But it's also Intel at $568.50, according to Pricewatch.

"The savings that you have with the Dragon platform are going to result in users being able to make other investments that enhance the performance of their solution," stated Simon Solotko. "Essentially, they'll be able to upgrade to a 10,000 RPM hard drive, buy a faster GPU, all those things are going to be made possible."

Perhaps the best news of all for AMD is that Dell is announcing for CES its XPS 625 system, which should become available immediately, will support the Dragon platform. Dell's Alienware division is also cooking up something for the first quarter of this year, as is Dell's arch-rival HP. Dragon could be the start of a comeback of epic proportions for AMD. But that's exactly what the company needs, and what it has to pull off.