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  • enu73 - Monday, August 24, 2009 - link

    Oh God so confusing, Please help me, i am planning a gaming PC, what should I choose Intel 9400 or AMD 940,,
    Please please help me
  • ashr7870 - Wednesday, April 13, 2016 - link

    I do hope you chose the X4-940~
  • realpower3288 - Thursday, July 16, 2009 - link

    Hi,

    I was trying to see the benefit of moving to quad core performace on my P35 chipset which is a budget build.. so i went and behold, got a Q8400 for just USD 150.. after some bargaining... threw my OC dual core to the store room..

    when i first power up my PC, i was like hmmm it seems slower during loading boot up... loading of certain apps. Some apps seem faster.

    So i decided to try doing everything at once...installing world in conflict.. stream youtube..chat and work. had 24 inch wide LCd... so multitask is not that painful. Not bad, I could never do this on a dual core, there was no lag in switching apps and its fast..

    To cut the story short, it was slower in loading certain apps and games (modern FPS, strategy). So i decided to OC ... ho ho i easily reach 3.5 Mhz with my recycled artic cooler at 60C max load. I have not even gone to max coverclock speed yet.

    My view on this chip, in its default settings it is just a low speed quad core.. but when you overclock this chip it seems to be nuclear powered... (loaded 2 games and switched side by side to play)....
    Wait is this another chip in disguise???






  • v12v12 - Saturday, May 16, 2009 - link

    I don't really care about a few pittance dollars vs Intel. I'm not an intel-zealot. But I can clearly see who actually has a CONSISTENT performance road map Vs a couple 1-hit-wonders and a crappy album with filler chips.

    Intel has proven their roadmap is viable; if all you AMD fanboys want to get socket-locked into a highly ambiguous hardware platform. then be my guest. I'll stick with Intel and wait for the price drop (they have a pattern, proving this) and know for certain that my current hardware will be on an upgradeable path to i7-Core, when their price drops... THEN what answer will AMD provide? It can barely "compete" (see 1-2 chips barely making PAR is NOT "competitive") with the antiquated Core2Duo... Nehalem is at min 20-30% faster and growing with every *tick* & *tock* release.

    Unfortunately I understand the AMD'ers passion and pull for them; I AM pulling for them, as it's better for prices when competition is high. I'm on my old XP-A right now, but I refuse to drink the coolaid. AMD did great to catch up to C2D, but a little late don't you think? Go AMD... but please shop with sense.

    Your AMD box that "competes" now, will soon be a hard to sell item, once it falls even further behind, when Intel decides at a whim to drop prices. Competing on price is a very fickle and unreliable method of securing sales. Compete with superior products and they will sell themselves.
  • Hatisherrif - Sunday, May 10, 2009 - link

    Well, if people were smarter then we'd not only have AMD to talk about, but it would be a question if Intel could stay on it's legs. As AnandTech recently mentioned in their Crossfire Phenom II review, the gaming performance on AMD chips is much smoother and fluid. But when "gamers" see a benchmark with Intel above 120 and AMD at 90 they want to go Intel for sure. That is why everyone should read from trusted sources that give personal opinion and experience in games. It is my personal experience also. I have 9800GT with 4GB RAM and Intel E4600, while my friend has 2GB, 9600GT and AMD Athlon 5000+. Every single game lags due to low fps on my rig, while on his, with twice less RAM, goes as fluid as hell. It doesn't even lag on explosions or anything. Besides that, his system is much more stable and fast. But noooooooooooo, ME'Z GONNA BUYZ INTELZ BEKAZ INTELZ MONOPOLZ IZ GUUUD. AND INTELZ HAZ HIGHER FPS!
  • Lolimaster - Saturday, May 9, 2009 - link

    You want to see a true review with real numbers results?

    How about this?
    Q9650 vs PII 940 (Both at 3Ghz)

    video compressión/edition
    audio compresión/edition
    3d render
    image edition
    etc

    http://foro.noticias3d.com/vbulletin/showthread.ph...">http://foro.noticias3d.com/vbulletin/showthread.ph...

    The results?
    On average the Q9650 is 4-5% faster than the 940. Obviously you not find this in "inteltech, your source for hardware-bias analisys and news".

    Now the 940 is way cheaper than the Q9550, that's a deal. Intel need to drop prices, but they don't want to, you think a slowy Q8400 has a good price? You're part of the problem.
  • mhahnheuser - Friday, May 8, 2009 - link

    I have used alternative cpu's for years because although not always up to speed they competed well feature for feature and were simply more price/performance competitive. AMD has spent most of its life performing lower in BM's to Intel. Why this is the biggest news since bread came sliced to the Intel community all of a sudden is a mystery to me. (It's not really, they are hanging on by their fingernails, and clinging to any fact no matter how pathetic).

    Now that there is something that won't run on these cheap flogger Intel cpu's, that won their fine reputations on the refined and outrageously expensive cousins, and.......

    suddenly it's "Houston we have a problem," and we(Anandtech) defend the indefensible, with a bucket load of excuses, or was it that we now have to defend the fact that we relentlessy flogged that technology to consumers without asking enough questions? Now, suddenly, virtulisation doesn't matter. Thank god it wasn't AMD who left it off.

    This is a sad sad article as I think it is deeply misleading. Not only does the article clearly show that the P2 940 is superior in performance, offers the independant core technology found only in Intel's latest processors the i7 & the as yet phantom i5, and offers platform upgrade path to DDR3 memory and has virtulisation included and that, somehow, is concluded that the 8400 is a viable alternative. Get real Anantech! time wake up in the real world.

    The real news in this article was that, to my vast ammusement I might add, the fabeled and much vaunted Q6600 starting to fall behind the X2 in some of the benchmarks. Is this a result of the forward thinking of AMD to go independant core? I wonder.
  • skasucks478 - Monday, June 1, 2009 - link

    DDR2 v DDR3 is no real deal breaker for building a system of now. DDR3 is new (and more expensive for the little performance difference) and very far from being what DDR2 is now to DDR. The joy of new RAM type is that it will be at least 6mo until DDR3 is the "OH HELL YEAH!" RAM.

    Oh, don't look now, but a lot of 775 boards now offer DDR3!
  • FalcomPSX - Friday, May 8, 2009 - link

    Maybe i just got lucky, but my phenom II 940 overclocks extremely well. On stock cooling, without bumping the voltage one bit i'm able to hit 3.5ghz, 100% stable while gaming, or stressing the cpu. a bump of 0.05v to 1.40 was all i needed to get 3.6ghz stable, but at that point temps started to get too high for the stock cooler between the increased speed and voltage bump. It ran fine for hours, but i just prefer lower cpu temps(at this point i was seeing 60 C at 100% load) I have no doubt in my mind i could easily get to ~3.8ghz with a aftermarket cooler and a bit more voltage. Unlocked multipliers make it ridiculously easy to overclock these things, and once i hit a wall, i can tune individual cores. Intel can't compete with these features unless you go to their extreme edition $1000+ cpu's.
  • lef - Monday, May 11, 2009 - link

    You are not lucky. Mine also overclocks to 3.4Ghz on stock voltage/cooling at 17x and these guys can only do 3.2ghz ... i haven't even tried 3.5 but since you are able to hit it i will try it
  • TA152H - Friday, May 8, 2009 - link

    Anand,

    Have you ever asked Intel why they don't lower the latency of their processors when they cut the cache size? Why should a processor with two MB cache run at the same latency as one with six MB? Certainly it does not need to.

    I could understand it where they are just cutting off some of the cache because it's faulty, but when they are actually two different dies, with the different cache sizes designed into the chip, why do they artificially slow down the chips with the smaller cache? They should have no trouble lopping off one cycle, since the 4 MB Conroes were 14 instead of 15, and these processors are 2 MB cache per core, so it could allow 13 cycles, but surely can handle 14 easily.

    It's maddening when Intel slows things down for no good reason. It's probably a marketing decision, and we all know how marketing decisions are.
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, May 8, 2009 - link

    It actually comes down to design resources. It's fairly easy to change a cache size, but changing the access latency requires more of a design change. I'm guessing those resources are better spent on newer architectures. e.g. Intel could go back and make even better versions of the Penryn based cores, but it makes more sense to put those efforts into engineering Westmere and its successors.

    Plus, a given architecture is usually optimized for whatever latency cache it's originally designed with. Speeding up the L2 may not yield as big of a gain as it would had the architecture been originally designed around a faster L2.

    I believe there's always a focus on lowering cache latencies, and that's what we saw with Nehalem. From what I've heard, the new focus is bringing down that L3 latency...

    Take care,
    Anand
  • Seramics - Friday, May 8, 2009 - link

    I noticed a strange trend in Phenom II X3 720 performance. They consistently performed very well, always outperforming similarly clocked buy quad core model of PII X4 920 and sometimes even besting PII X4 940. Strange... wonder why is that... the only advantage of 720 over quad models is higher L3 cache per core... but still, i would thought even 920 should be better.... strange strange
  • cfaalm - Friday, May 8, 2009 - link

    Why are we getting new Core2 models in the first place? Shouldn't Intel be selling us i5 rather sooner than later?
  • garydale - Friday, May 8, 2009 - link

    In almost every benchmark the AMD chip bested the (cheaper) Intel - often by a noticeable margin. The real competition for the 940 remains the 9400. A better comparison would have been between the 8400 and one of AMD's comparably-priced CPUs.

    Still, with VT disabled on the 8400, we're talking apples and oranges. I don't know what Intel were thinking by disabling it but seems remarkably silly with virtualisation even hitting home users these days. It's quite like disabling SSE but the idea seems like a win for marketing over engineering. Pay the extra $30 and get a CPU.
  • ssj4Gogeta - Saturday, May 9, 2009 - link

    I can't understand what all this fuss is about. As if everyone in the world is going to be running the Ultimate version of Windows.
  • LoneWolf15 - Friday, May 8, 2009 - link

    Intel VT as well.

    Sorry, I think my Q6600 is worth more than a Q8400 for that reason alone. I'm also pretty sure that AMD's hardware virtualization trickles down to a cheaper level than Intel's does.

    Intel really needs to stop cutting VT on all but perhaps Celeron-class CPU's and maybe Pentium Dual-Core on laptops. I certainly wouldn't buy anybody's quad-core that didn't have it.
  • leexgx - Friday, May 8, 2009 - link

    all AM2 or higher chips have amd-V (apart from semprons None of them have amd-V), i think some 939 cpus have amd-V not sure but not the point realy as thay not been sold for years

    all q8000 cpus do not have VT (unless thay bring one out that does), q9000 do
  • Scali - Friday, May 8, 2009 - link

    Yup, AMD leaves VT enabled on pretty much everything.
    Makes sense, because it's an added value over Intel's offerings, and it doesn't cost much extra, since it's already in the chip design.

    For Intel it makes sense to leave it disabled, because it's a feature that's mainly useful for business users, and Intel has always tried to push business users to the high-end CPUs by disabling certain features on the lower-end models. Performance alone isn't really a reason to get a high-end CPU anymore.
  • LoneWolf15 - Friday, May 8, 2009 - link

    It will be useful for far more than business users shortly. Windows 7's new XP-mode option requires Intel VT or AMD-V. While I admit that so far I haven't had app issues under Win7RC (that includes 32-bit app issues in a 64-bit environment) there IS one 16-bit app I still run that I'm sure I'll need XP mode for under 64-bit Windows. I'm also sure there will be other instances that pertain to the general market.

    Eventually, hypervisors are going to be a big deal, just like multi-core processors are becoming now. At that point, people without Intel VT will be screwed, and I think they'll be pretty ticked if they're the ones that thought that buying a quad-core CPU like the Q8400 was a good future-proofing move.
  • Scali - Friday, May 8, 2009 - link

    I was already considering XP mode in my earlier post.
    I don't think that will be a big deal. Most people won't need it. Besides, you can still stick to XP or 32-bit Vista (not sure if 16-bit apps work in 32-bit Windows 7, else even that would be an option) if you have some applications that won't work in Win7. That way you don't need hardware virtualization either.

    I don't think hypervisors are going to be a big deal for the majority of people, since they simply don't need any kind of virtualization to begin with. It may be interesting for servers and such, but not for your average office machine, of which there are FAR more in the world.
    And for home users it won't be an issue anyway, because they generally won't even run a version of Windows 7 that supports XP Mode in the first place.
  • leexgx - Friday, May 8, 2009 - link

    but with intel you have to Realy check what CPU you are getting to see if it does support VT as thay do not state fully if it has VT or not all the time (not from the Q8x00 model any way) where as you get sempron it has no AMD-v get an norm AMD64 it has AMD-v that simple

    should never be turnd off realy its only been turnd off in the first place all of there cpus support VT (q8x00 i think is the exception as none of them have the VT option)

  • Scali - Friday, May 8, 2009 - link

    I'd like to comment on the closing statement of the article.
    I don't like the idea of supporting a company that has failed to deliver the goods for a few years now. It seems like AMD has dug a hole so deep that it's impossible to get out of it now. Buying AMD products isn't going to bring competition back. People ARE buying AMD products because they have such low prices (recently AMD has taken back some marketshare from Intel), but because of the low prices AMD just doesnt' bring in enough money. This also means they won't have a good budget for developing more competitive products in the future.

    In my opinion it seems AMD has already lost. They made two mistakes:
    1) They completely underestimated Intel and didn't do enough to prepare for Intel's Core2 back when AMD was still performance leader with the K7/K8 and was on top of its game.
    2) Their acquisition of ATi was ill-informed. They paid way too much for that company, and they seem to have purchased it at the worst possible time.

    This has weakened AMD so badly that it seems inevitable that they go bankrupt... The question is just: when.
  • just4U - Saturday, May 9, 2009 - link

    I disagree with you on this. How was AMD able to "do enough" when they were the performance leader? It's not like they were making boat loads of money. Intel was. Didn't seem to matter that the P4 sucked in comparison they just kept on keeping on.

    That was due in part, to interesting business deals that Intel made to keep Amd down (or so the lawsuits say) but the juries still out on all that (just thought I'd note it)

    I don't really see AMD making mistakes at all right now. They've got a nice lineup of video cards, and Cpu's that are in price brackets where the bulk of hardware is being sold. It will be interesting to see if they can build some momentum from it and hopefully it's not to little to late!
  • Scali - Sunday, May 10, 2009 - link

    Well, if you're performance leader, you have to milk that position.
    For starters, AMD didn't do enough to market their processors. As you say, P4 sales just kept going. Probably for a large part because most people didn't even know about the Athlons anyway, or had no idea about how fast they were.

    Then you also have to make sure you bring in the money by selling the right products at the right prices. And then you have to invest your profits into better production facilities and future products.

    After the success of K8, the K10 is a pretty mediocre CPU. It's little more than two K8s joined together, with some L3-cache, and some minor architectural changes. Now either AMD just didn't put enough effort into designing a newer architecture, because they thought K8 was going to keep Intel off for years... or they just made the wrong decisions, screwed up (K9?), and then had to redo the design, wasting a lot of money, and coming up with a product that was much delayed, and far less spectacular than they would have hoped.
    Either way, AMD should have done better with the K8's successor. They didn't, and that's why they are where they are right now.
  • lef - Friday, May 8, 2009 - link

    i can overclock my 940 just by setting the multiplier at 17x to 3400 with stock voltage (asus m3a79-t) at 2 seconds and you could only do 16x 3200?. what's the matter with you guys? are you incompetent or you are just misleading people here?
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, May 8, 2009 - link

    Our Phenom II X4 940 was not stable enough to run through all of our tests at 3.4GHz without additional voltage. Remember that when overclocking your mileage may vary. We saw the same 3.2GHz limit without increasing the stock voltage on our other 940 when we first reviewed the chips back in January.

    It is possible that later productions are more overclockable and as we all know the Phenom II X4 955 does much better at stock voltages than any of the AM2+ parts we'd seen up to that point. It's really a question of whether or not AMD is focused on producing more 940s or will production eventually shift over to 945s entirely. If it's the latter, I don't expect stock voltage overclocking to improve much more on the 940. If it's the former, then the 940 should eventually be as good as the newer AM3 parts for overclocking.

    Take care,
    Anand
  • sluk - Friday, May 8, 2009 - link

    Developer of VirtualBox (Sun Microsystems) claimed that hardware accelerated virtualization in fact perform slower than software virtualization. I wonder if there is any 3rd party benchmark test can confirm this or if it is only true for Virtualbox. If this is the case, why you need to care about VT support in CPU, you can just run your XP virtual machine with any type of CPU in Windows 7.
  • stmok - Sunday, May 10, 2009 - link

    It isn't so straightforward.

    The first generation of VT support in CPUs really benefits the software developer. It makes it easier for them to implement a robust virtualization environment. It isn't primarily about performance. (The gain is very little).

    The 2nd generation with features like nested paging are. But that is only in Phenom I/II and Core i5/7 generations.

    It leads me to believe Microsoft was scrambling to address the WinXP compatibility issues with custom business software in Windows 7.

    Software using hardware virtualization is far easier to develop. (They have a deadline to meet, as well as customer expectations).
  • DeepThought86 - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link

    Ummmm, how can we assume that wafer costs are the main costs associated with CPU production? Both AMD and Intel have already invested billions in fab construction, fab equipment, researcher salaries, marketing budgets, admin staff etc etc.

    To say that after all that what's killing AMD is the costs of the wafers is plain silly. Sure, it's a higher variable cost. But what proportion are variable costs compared to fixed costs? If AMD stopped selling Semprons and X2s and shifted their production to 100% Phenom II 2.5 GHzs, would their costs go up significantly compared to the losses they've been making?
  • eXistenZ - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link

    Obviously, AMD is no good in Far Cry 2 game. K8, K10, K10.5, al these architectures were always slower than intel's competitors. And it is really crappy game, so i don't see any reason why are you testing right on this one. I think, more fair testing is with Crysis or CPU-eaters = RTS...
  • Goty - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link

    Anand seems to be buying into all the FUD about AMD lately. Sure, AMD's not doing so hot right now, but they're not in much worse a position than they were in the middle of the P4 era (probably about the same position, all told).
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, May 8, 2009 - link

    I'm not sure I would call it FUD. AMD lost $2.36B before taxes in the last four quarters combined. Their chief competitor made $6.13B. Now Intel has always made more than AMD, but the issue now is that AMD is losing a considerable amount every quarter. That can only continue for so long.

    What I'm more worried about is the impact this is having on the next-generation cores that AMD is developing. While engineering budgets are the last things to go, if you're losing a few hundred million a quarter everyone from marketing to engineering gets hurt.

    Ignoring the problem isn't going to make it go away, I felt that it would be important to at least bring some of this stuff to the table so we can at least be thinking about it.

    Take care,
    Anand
  • microAmp - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link

    Actually, it's worse, they are running out of cash.
  • ssj4Gogeta - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link

    "It's the beauty of Moore's Law: with fewer transistors crammed into a much smaller area, we're able to see the same performance."

    Shouldn't it be "MORE transistors crammed into a much smaller area"?

    :)
  • hooflung - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link

    I am another that buys based on the ability of Virtualization via virt functionality. I got a P2 940 because I wanted the ability to have 4 cores to split up to VM's running Hyper-V, Xen and KVM. I just can't do that on new intel chips that fall in the price range right now.

    My C2D is still rocking a venerable 1ghz OC on a e4300 and P35 chipset. For me to install an OS to do development as the top level is just wasting wattages at my home.


  • snakeoil - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link

    ''Phenom II Earns a Financially Troubled AMD Less per Chip than Core 2 Quad''

    well you are saying that amd make less money because phenom 2 has a little more area,but in your happy calculations you forgot that bad quad core dies are used to make tricores and soon dual cores phenoms.
    harvesting.

    what are you doing little annand
  • crimson117 - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link

    One wafer costs a fixed amount to make; let's say $200.

    Let's say AMD can get 10 CPUs made from each wafer, while intel can get 20 smaller CPUs from each wafer. They each sell their chips for $180.

    AMD puts $200/10 = $20 worth of wafer into each $180 CPU.
    Intel only has to put in $200/20 = $10 worth of wafer into each $180 CPU.

    So assuming all other things are equal, Intel makes $5 more on each CPU sale than AMD.
  • crimson117 - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link

    *clicks Edit button*

    So assuming all other things are equal, Intel makes $10 more on each CPU sale than AMD.
  • mkruer - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link

    You are also forgetting that AMD and Intel use two different lithphogathy technologies to AMD uses submersion and Intel uses double pattering. The Submersion takes slightly longer then a single pattering, and yeild fewer defects. This meas that AMD should be able to preduce a high volume of chips per platter then Intel. Adding to the confusion, is that neiter intel nor AMD releases what there yeilds are and as such, too comepare based upon die size alone is folly. People can crunch the numbers anyway they want, but in the end it should be a, for more or less, wash.
  • erple2 - Saturday, May 9, 2009 - link

    while there may be fewer defects per wafer, there are also fewer chips per wafer (about 57% fewer). To take the analogy to the extreme, lets say that AMD makes one chip that consumes the entire wafer, and Intel can make 2. If there is, on average, 1 defect per wafer for AMD and 5 defects per wafer for Intel, AMD has zero good chips per wafer, and Intel has (on average), 2 good chips per 5 wafers. That example is horribly contrived, sure, but I used it to show that even having a better process (fewer defects per wafer) doesn't guarantee a good result if the size of the chunks you use on the wafer is significantly larger - AMD's can fit quite a few less per wafer (about half?).
  • erple2 - Saturday, May 9, 2009 - link

    arg... edit button... Intel would have 1 good chip per 3 wafers. I assumed 4 defects per wafer, not 5 in the 2/5 ...
  • slayerized - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link

    You are confusing yield and throughput - they are two different things.
  • 8steve8 - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link

    no Virtualization Tech... so no windows 7 virtual PC, no hyper-v...

    that sucks.

    rather go phenom 2, intel e8xxx or q9xxx
  • ltcommanderdata - Friday, May 8, 2009 - link

    I don't think the lack of VT will be a huge issue for the average consumer. The Q8400 is a budget quad core and OEMs will no doubt be bundling Windows 7 Home Premium with it which doesn't support XP Mode anyways. Tech savy buyers who build their own computers with a Q8400 and Professional Edition would notice, but the larger impediment to XP Mode adoption is probably still Microsoft's production edition matrix.
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link

    Very good point, I've updated the conclusion to point out the difference. Honestly it's ridiculous that Intel isn't enabling it on these chips.

    Take care,
    Anand
  • spazmedia - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link

    I second this. Just bought a intel box with an E5200 thinking it had VT. Hopefully they will follow AMD's lead.

  • GeorgeH - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link

    +1

    No support for Windows 7 XP Mode is the reason I chose AMD over an Intel Q8X00 in the PC I just built.
  • leomax999 - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link

    Intel has announced vt support for Q8300, E7400, E7500, E5300, E5400.
    So i dont see any reason why q8400 shouldnt get it.
    http://www.tcmagazine.com/comments.php?shownews=25...">http://www.tcmagazine.com/comments.php?shownews=25...
  • GeorgeH - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link

    Thanks for the link, but to be clear the chips you listed will never support VT.

    Intel is supposed to be releasing Q8300".1", E7400".1", etc. chips, but unless they change the model number I can only see that leading to mass confusion. Forcing average people to check the S-Spec or MM number against a list to see what they're actually getting is a classic recipe for fail.

    Until those updated Intel chips hit the market, AMD will remain the only real choice for budget and midrange quad core.
  • TA152H - Friday, May 8, 2009 - link

    Because of Windows XP virtualization? Are you crazy?

    OK, here's a reality check for those who think Windows XP virtualization is the greatest thing since the Atom Bomb.

    It's not, it's a kludge, and if you want Windows XP, get Windows XP. It's going to be slower, because virtualization does have overhead, and running it in some virtual mode isn't the same as running something in XP.

    How many applications really only run in XP anyway???? Show me a software vendor in this day that only supports apps in XP, and I'll show you one that's going out of business, really soon. They're incompetent.

    If you're a software vendor, whether you like it or not, Vista is taking over, simply because Microsoft has it pre-installed on the vast majority of machines.

    Backwards compatibility of this type can be helpful in some situations, but the importance is getting way overblown. It's not a show-stopper for the vast majority of people buying a PC, price is, and the Pentium branded CPUs offered a lot of value for the performance they give, and are excellent products.

    Judging them from something of limited use, on an operating system that has not even been released, about a feature Microsoft announced a few weeks ago, is completely unfair to Intel. Going back before the Microsoft announcement, did anyone think people would be using that feature much on a budget processor? It was a good way for Intel to avoid Pentiums being used in an unintended market. Now, they might change it, since the use is more universal, but it is hardly damning for them to not have included it.

    I do not know when Microsoft decided to tell Intel about this, but, it could very well have been after Intel finalized their specifications on the chips. If Intel's next Pentiums do not have this feature, I might be a little less understanding of it, but really, it is does not remove them as a choice, because it is really not as useful as people are saying. I would probably never use the feature, virtually (no pun intended) all apps run on Vista now, or have a version that runs on it, and Windows XP apps running on Windows 7 will not be as fast as those running on Windows XP. I don't think I'll have too much need for this type of kludge. But if you do, get a processor that does support it.
  • GeorgeH - Friday, May 8, 2009 - link

    Crazy? One can never be sure, but the voices say no.

    XP Mode is something most people will never need, use, or be aware of and is most definitely not the best thing since the "Atom Bomb." (Aside: If the "Atom Bomb" is your go-to comparison for all things great, you might want to do some crazy checks of your own.)

    Both AMD and Intel offer about the same performance at the same price points in budget and midrange quad cores. However, AMD's offerings can perform tasks that Intel's simply cannot. Even if the chance of you wanting to perform those tasks is miniscule, you'd have to be a fool to select the hamstrung Intel offerings.

    You can play the Intel apologist all you want, but the fact is that Intel deliberately disabled VT support in an attempt to force their customers into purchasing more expensive processors if they wanted a fully functional PC. Microsoft is blameless here; Intel simply got too greedy and as a result is now being caught with their pants down.
  • taisingera - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link

    They could do something like Q8310 or E7410 to show that there is a bit more value in the cpu.
  • leomax999 - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link

    Intel has announced vt support for Q8300, E7400, E7500, E5300, E5400.
    So i dont see any reason why q8400 shouldnt get it.
    http://www.tcmagazine.com/comments.php?shownews=25...">http://www.tcmagazine.com/comments.php?shownews=25...
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, May 8, 2009 - link

    You are very correct - Intel just informed me that the Q8400 has VT-x from the start. The other CPUs you mentioned will get VT in the latest versions but I don't believe it's retroactive. I believe it's a new silicon revision for those chips that enables it, but all Q8400s have it.

    Take care,
    Anand
  • piroroadkill - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link

    iirc amd-v is better than intel vt
  • duploxxx - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link

    oh great 2 versions of cpu just because of painfull wrong marketing decissions in the past.

    way to go intel ....and what about all the other q8xxx series? or a full list of mobile cpu's
  • Samus - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - link

    its just disabled in hardware, which means it can be re-enabled, just like cores can be re-enabled on phenom x3. just let someone figure it out. they will. they always do :)
  • Roland00 - Friday, May 8, 2009 - link

    you can re-enable the Phenom II tri cores for they were disabled via software.

    If the chip is disable via hardware (using a laser to disable parts of the chip) then there is nothing you can do to re-enable the chip. Then first generation Phenoms can't be re-enabled for it was disabled via hardware.
  • JumpingJack - Saturday, June 6, 2009 - link

    Depends on how it is disabled. Fusing in a chip can be actual diabling of circuits or actual 1's and 0's that make the logic read by the BIOS at startup (such as CPUID), the CPUID then dictates from BIOS code feature sets etc. etc. that are enabled.

    This is how quads arise from tri-cores and dual cores from AMD -- the core is not physically fused off/disconnected, rather the BIOS reads a certain CPUID and identifies it as 'a tri-core'. In such a case, features can be turned 'on' or 'off' simply by updating the BIOS.

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