Gimme the dragon baby.

More and more news pop out all over the holy internet about the AMD Phenom successor every day. Indeed the moment to present my stream of thoughts.

AMD’s new flagship will hit the market in January. Formerly called Phenom X4-20950wtfisthisnamelame even AMD’s own PR-Division realized this name just plainly sucks ass. And there it is: the brandnew and shiny Phenom II. Sounds like a rocket ship, a dildo or grandma’s pills or whatever. However maybe that’s just me. Perhaps it was time to close this chapter. But who am I to judge. In my eyes what AMD really needed was something completely different, but then of course successful promotion was never AMD’s core competence. Obviously the synonym Phenom is a derivate of phenomenal. Well well, at least in one case the name became reality: the Phenom was a phenomenal economic failure and couldn’t live up the expectations. Hence maybe AMD could do better with some totally cool, hip and different naming, that doesn’t bring up some bad bad memories. Dark tales of delayed deliveries, much to low frequencys and the big end boss: the infamous TLB bug.

From the technological view it looks like AMD could end the disastrous history of the Phenom. The Phenom II seems to solve all those problems. Hopefully. Previews talk about stable Phenom II CPU’s running at 4GHz air cooled. That’s a huge step considering that it is hard to persuade the old Phenom to run stable at only 3GHz. With LN2-Cooling the new CPU from AMD seems to run well over 5GHz. Whatever “well over” means. Journalists where not allowed to give exact rates. Rumor has it that this new baby can run at 6GHz (stable!).

AMD only knows to good, they can’t really compete with Intel at the highest end of line of X86 computing power. Hence hey throw an 3GHz Black Edition Phenom II on the market in January. AMD is targeting the more mid-high-end segment instead of competing with Intels new i7. A contest they can only lose at this point of the game, so it occurs. Part of this strategy is the new platform, called dragon. The dragon, consisting of the HD48XX GPU, the new 7xx chipset and the 45nm Phenom II, replaces the foregoing spider platform. For under 1000$ the dragon trio looks like an extremely competitive and powerful option.

In fact it seems like AMD is back in the game. Without a doubt that is good news, not just for infantile AMD fanboys like me. Intel dominates the market at this point. That this is not a very welcome situation from the customers point of view, obviously. We really need to see some movement here. Let’s hope for the best.

Remember, we had the same situation at the GPU market only one and a half year ago. Nvidia was dominating the market, as a result selling their tech for the same very high price over a long period of time. Ati could not compete at this point. Things changed after Ati released the HD3800 series. Since then prices went down and the customers get a lot more horsepower for the same amount of money now. (Besides Nvidia still tries to cheat the customer into buying the same old crap by relabeling the now really old 8800 series to 9800. Same chip, even higher price, ridiculous.)
On the whole let’s hope we see the same story repeating with the CPU market. If not, AMD slowly starts to have a real situation here. And so will the customer. But then there is always the option of a good book.

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