14 DAY TRIAL // The recently unveiled Advanced Micro Devices’ roadmap showed us that the chip manufacturer plans to release a number of new platforms next year, and that one of these platforms is code-named Dragon. The Sunnyvale company has already tried to bring to the market a similar platform, called Spider, which consisted of a Phenom processor, a 790FX motherboard and a HD3800 series graphics card. Dragon will be Spider's successor, and it is said to feature a Phenom II processor, a 790 series motherboard and a HD4800 series card.
The Phenom II processors are highly improved compared to Phenom chips. The integrated cache is leveraged from 4MB to 8MB, the core clock speed is set at 3GHz, while also featuring support for DDR3-1333 memory modules. For those that do not know, the 940/920 Phenom with highest speeds only features support for DDR2 memory. The 790 series motherboard on the Dragon platform features SB750 Southbridge chip, which also comes as another improvement over the Spider platform.
AMD has released some test results on the new platform as well, demonstrating its capabilities in comparison to previous products. The test systems featured DDR2-800 memory, Seagate 7200.10 500G HD and Windows Vista x64 SP1 OS. The old platform included a Phenom 9950 processor running at 2.6GHz, while Dragon featured the Phenom II 940 processor clocked at 3GHz. Dragon managed to totally out pace the older platform, even reaching an over 40 percent performance increase in HD gaming.
Although the video cards used on the platforms have not been named, the Dragon platform needs no effort to surpass Spider. Moreover, the productivity bench relies less on card and multimedia video coding abilities, but the improvements rise above 20 percent. A look at the performance chart published on news site Hardspell will show you how well Dragon is able to perform compared to Spider.