AMD PHENOM 9550 vs Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 – Final Words
Similar to the reviews back in the day, the results here also tells a similar tale. The “Kentsfield” Core 2 Quads was overall a superior CPU than the “Agena/Barcelona” Phenoms. The Q6600 just provided a better experience if you wanted max performance. The Q6600 won most of the benchmarks and many times by more than 15% and higher. Even using an overclock of 2.64 MHz for the Phenom it often came short of the stock Q6600. Of course, once you added you’re own Q6600 overclock there was nothing even close to it in almost every benchmark result. When Intel finally lowered the price to $266 I remember a great many people bypassing dual core CPUs and getting the Q6600 instead.
When the Phenom’s clock speeds didn’t meet expectations AMD was going to have to try and lean on their new micro-architecture changes to pull up the slack if they wanted the performance crown again. While the new core definitely brought IPC increases compared to the Athlon 64 (there will be a future article on that), even some IPC gains on the high side, they just weren’t enough. So AMD began competing using price instead.
Overall, I think history shows that Intel probably made the right call when it comes to first generation quad-core designs especially with the superior “Conroe” architecture able to brute-force as needed. I recall an AMD executive some time afterwards mentioning that they should have probably used an MCM approach for their first generation quad-core CPU instead of the complexity of a native design. Since AMD couldn’t compete in absolute performance, they made their CPU’s attractive by competitive pricing. You could easily save a $100 or more on the CPU as well as save on a comparable motherboard.
In the end, while Intel made a few “shortcuts” with “Kentsfield” as you could say, I think they made the right decision at the time to have a fast to market 4-core design.