I am still wondering why my Phenom II 1090T CPU vanished, it's still kicking all comers on my PC, gaming wise, well yes I have a better than average chipset, RAM, video card, and motherboard, too.
Don't wake the people still buying local chain store PCs, they need their sleep.
After the AMD Bulldozer debacle I recall that they said they were going to concentrate on mobile computing and smart phone products.
Thankfully they reconsidered this decision.
Intel is arrogant and obnoxious with easy success lately. I'm glad to see that AMD is going to try and reenter the high performance PC market.
This will be interesting to see how well it will sell. All the points that have been brought up are good.
Love me some 5ghz :) (maybe not for $800 though...)
When the Phenom II chips were discontinued the six cores were snapped up first. I saw the prices of them rise substantially after they got scarce. New Egg still has this along with the popular Athlon Propus 3GHZ chip.
AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition Deneb 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor HDZ965FBGMBOX - Newegg.com
AMD Athlon II X4 640 Propus 3.0GHz Socket AM3 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor ADX640WFGMBOX - Newegg.com
Makes you wonder if they really are still making them for older motherboard (AM2 and AM3) owners. Also I don't believe all the hype about Intel being faster. If you benchmark all day and night sure but I don't and I know I built 2 six core Phenom machines for the price of one machine with Intel's most expensive chip. I have always bought AMD (except in netbook came with atom) since they are less expensive giving me more back for the $. I am not a gamer, more of a music and picture editing web browsing casual gaming power user. Not a fan boy either, just live in the real world with a very limited income. If money was no object I would build myself a $10K machine just because I needed to spend some of the interest I was earning
Newegg had a sale on the quad core Phenom II the other day. While I've always been a fan of Intel CPUs, I must admit that a decent quad core for $79 USD was very tempting indeed!
My wallet lives to buy another day though, I'm currently not in the market for a new computer.
I prefer to have an i3 for a bit more since Intel's performance per core is much higher than AMD. For my tasks, I typically just do web browsing, MS Excel calculations, online flash games, simulation softwares, etc. and since most of these tasks are single/dual threaded, an i3 would outperform the AMD in this case.
For a while, Intel has their own uber expensive 10 core Nehalem as well as 8 core Sandy Bridge Xeons that beat a 3970x at stock speeds in terms of raw performance. If AMD's new Centurion can put a dent on the Intel's enthusiast CPUs, Intel would be forced to innovate and not making their enthusiast line stagnant for a long time.
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