AMD's 45nm desktop CPU's will be here in January if all goes well.

Details in the news article

That`s quite a shot across the bow.

I really hope this next gen for AMD packs a real enthusiastic punch. It`s all well and good pushing Intel`s prices, but they also have some pure performance behind them. Cap the performance, beat the price, and I`d certainly entertain some AM3 stuff. I`m about due for some AMD tinkering, it`s been a while.

If the early Shanghai tests are anything to go by, we should be in for a treat. Power consumption if looking sweet as a nut. If the rumored overclocking headroom is there it should be able to sway a few people away from a costly Nehalem platform, being backwards compatible with current AM2+ boards provides a cheap upgrade to some brand new tech.

Power consumption is not really a care of mine, sure its nice but I am against AMD tryingg to make that a key selling point, us gamers/clockers want power! However if it works well ace, I have 2 AMD box's and my main rig still uses a 2.6Ghz Black Edition, but for gaming I still think Intel will hold safely, I just can't see it beating Core i7, but as we saw with ATi/AMD HD4000 series, they can pull it off sometime :D
Best of luck I say, and hey might spark another price wars, I don't think anyone here will complain at that

Dont get your hopes up boys. Phenom II is still rehashed BS on a 45nm process. They just tweaked the old cpus a little more. AMD needs to stop playing Nvidia and get somethign out thats new, and not a K8 rehash for todays standards.

I hear what ur saying PP. I actually think the theory behind the way the Phenom works is better than the Intel variant, just much slower.

I do fear tho that they're still in the mindset of being more efficient, less power intensive, and being able to "do the job" without excelling.

Well sadly Intels Yorkfield is faster than Phenom clock for clock. Then you have Pynryn and now Bloomfield out. AMD have some serious catching up to do and these rehashes arent doing them anything. Sadly if it wasnt for ATI i think theyd be hitting the stinker like alot of these other companies lately.

Yorkfield isn't decidedly faster, clock for clock, than Barcelona at all, in a lot of cases it's slower. It was always Barcelona's poor overclocking (and terrible power consumption scaling with clock speed) compared to Yorkfield that made it look slow.... heck even that was cured by the launch of SB750 motherboards, which have no problems getting Phenom's past 3Ghz.

Phenom 9950 Review


Deneb/Shanghai is also far, far more than just a Barcelona rehash. It's done on a completely new process (immersion lithography) and completely eradicates the problems that Barcelona suffered from; IE low cache, poor power consumption and low clock yields. If the early Shanghai benchmarks are anything to go by Deneb should sit nicely between Penryn and Nehalem in terms of performance (maybe excluding the top end QX7 chips).

But as i've said, Deneb's biggest selling point is going to be it's compatibility. It's a drop-in replacement for current AM2+ boards that supports both DDR2 and DDR3 straight out the box. If the rumours of 4Ghz+ overclocks are true Deneb can do a good job of swaying people away from a costly Nehalem system upgrade.