Contrary to AMD's claims at launch, all Phenoms are affected by a system-halting data-corrupting bug known as Erratum 298. The only way to fix it is an update which disables part of the L3 cache, causing a 40-50% drop in L3 performance. This translates to an average 14% drop in real-world performance, up to 50% in programs like Firefox.
Also, it was discovered that AMD had sent overclocked processors to reviewers, which artificially made the Phenom look more competitive to Intel's Core 2 Quad. Some may see this as being an even bigger issue, as it makes AMD look insincere.
do yourself a favour, get the Q6600 (or better), AMD is not the way to go (yet).
Does anyone else agree that the bigger part of the story is the fact that AMD sent out overclocked processors to reviewers, essentially invalidating all the Phenom reviews that are out there? Not only do you get a 14% performance hit if you want a stable CPU, retail units take a further hit compared to what we see in reviews because of the slower Northbridge clock!
I wonder if it has anything to do with chip yields. Maybe they couldn't get enough of the chips to run at 2ghz and had to downclock them to 1.8 to be able to get enough of them out the door for launch. That's giving them the benefit of the doubt though.
It's not like stuff like this hasn't happened before and won't happen again. Remember when Nvidia used to code their drivers to drop video quality during 3dmark runs in order to gain higher benchmark scores.
no more insecure then when it was reveal intel owned the companies that made the bench marking programs and some contained code that ran faster on intel processors then all others.