When it launched in early January, Phenom II's sole purpose, its raison d'être, was to rejuvenate AMD's ability to compete against Intel with something other than price cuts. Viewed in aggregate, benchmarks of the new CPUs prove that Sunnyvale succeeded; the X4 940 and 920 are tough opponents in the mainstream quad-core market. I don't want to downplay this achievement; a strong Deneb launch was vital if AMD is to continue as a going concern.
The problem is that Sunnyvale's future competition is locked, loaded, and launched. In the past, the question of whether AMD or Intel would hold a performance advantage "next time" was fueled by speculation and odd bits of data. In this case, Intel's "next-gen" design is already on the market and has been for several months. Nehalem is no paper tiger—it's here right now, and it'll hit the 940's current price point within 2009 (barring a major roadmap change).
So can AMD scale Phenom II to match Nehalem? We wanted to find out, because the answer will tell us how the AMD vs. Intel battle will shape up in 2009. So, we took one Phenom II 940, added coolant, overclocked it to 4.2GHz, and ran the benchmarks listed below.
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