45nm Phenom X4 Surfaces. Overclocked to 3.4GHz.

IMHO pricing is more important than raw performance to stay competetive... it's not as if AMD makes sucky chips, they're just 2nd best currently.

recoveringknowitall:

IMHO pricing is more important than raw performance to stay competetive... it's not as if AMD makes sucky chips, they're just 2nd best currently.

2nd out of third.... but should we really count via :-p

No because via doesn't even exsist in the enthusiast market and IMO HH is an enthusiast site!

News:

3.4GHz at this early stage is a good sign for AMD

But did they have to use some extreme-cooling to achieve this? I didn't see their cooling-solution mentioned anywhere!

mazuki:

you mean re-establishes as top dog in GFX :) before the 7xxx series nvidia, ATi was top all before

Not true at all, ATI was not on top till the 9700Pro came out and that was such a leap over what NVidia and anyone elseo n the market had, it took Nvidia the 5xxx series to be second, trying to catch back up, basically on par/better for a while with their 6xxx series vs ATI's X8xx series, then Nvidia pulled away big time with the 7xxx series, ATI has made strides to get back into the game, but it has taken them 3 product cycles and they still are not back on top. 

Compare this to the Intel vs AMD stuff, Intel was top dog for a long time, the P4 vs the Athlon XP, Intel won hands down, though the xp's got kinda close in some cases.  AMD's revolutionary Athlon 64 chip and K8 Architechure is what secured them the top spot for the performance crown for quite a while as Intel tried what they could to tweak thier Netburst architechure to try to compete with what AMD brought out.  Intel realized they couldnt tweak it enough and went back to the drawing board and came out with Conroe.  The Core 2 stuff put Intel ahead of the Athlon 64, and AMD tweaked on their K8 architechure trying to stay competitive while they worked on the K10.  Intel keeps chugging, putting AMD further behind, while AMD is tweaking on the K10.  At best i see the K10 being even with the penryn and wolfdale cores.  They need to let Intel have the top spot with Nehelm and go back to the drawing board and work on K11 and make it come out and beat the snot out of Nehelm.

Its a tit for tat kinda thing that goes on, and AMD is getting hit hard from both the cpu and vid card markets.  They are in a position to do great things, but the question is, will they focus on cpu or gfx, or can they do both.  Clearly Intel has the ability to do both and more since they are even into the relm of SSD drives, adn the new Larabee gfx that they are working on to compete with ATI and Nvidia.

Maybe it is time that Nvidia get into the cpu busness, wouldnt that be a monkey wrench into the whole shabang.

Looks good, hopefully we can get this out soon.

While it's true that enthusiasts make up a small percentage of the market, it is what happens in that market segment that affects the rest of the market.

As for Larabee, wasn't that supposed to only be integrated graphics? Or have they planned to go dicreet as well. Forgive the stupid question. I have been out of the loop for awhile.

I hope AMD gets this all sorted out. If they were to go under that would spell disaster for us all in the form of higher prices and stagnant R&D.

One of the things I had hoped for for the AMD/ATI merger was that AMD would bring it's dicipline and accountability to ATI. In the past ATI was very sloppy in getting things done on time and out the door. Not to mention sloppy and ill thought out drivers. I think we are begining to see AMD's effect on ATI. Let's hope this is the case as better competition benefits us all.