Competitive on price, sure. But it never held the performance crown. AMD hasn't held that since the Athlon 64 era.
The first gen Phenoms were outpaced by the Core 2 lineup, and the second gen Phenoms that became quite popular were handily beaten by the first gen i7's. The Phenom II was a great bang-for-the-buck chip though, no doubt.
I've owned all the relative players here: the Phenom 9500, Core2 Quad Q6600, Phenom II 955BE, and a core i7-920 (which is still in my main work machine that I'm typing this from right now).
The Q6600 and 955 were comparable in performance (955 much better at stock, slightly better when both chips OC'd), but the i7-920 was out at the 955's release, essentially leaving AMD a generation behind in performance. The 9500 was a dog and well known for an errata that hampered performance after a microcode update, and the i7 was leaps and bounds ahead of anything else at the time, and is still pretty usable today. My little brother has the 955 and it's showing its age in games (KotK being the worst offender).
The Phenom X6 had great performance both in terms of price and actual performance for developer / thread-heavy workloads. Although this is now ~seven years ago.
Competitive on price, sure. But it never held the performance crown. AMD hasn't held that since the Athlon 64 era.
The first gen Phenoms were outpaced by the Core 2 lineup, and the second gen Phenoms that became quite popular were handily beaten by the first gen i7's. The Phenom II was a great bang-for-the-buck chip though, no doubt.
I've owned all the relative players here: the Phenom 9500, Core2 Quad Q6600, Phenom II 955BE, and a core i7-920 (which is still in my main work machine that I'm typing this from right now).
The Q6600 and 955 were comparable in performance (955 much better at stock, slightly better when both chips OC'd), but the i7-920 was out at the 955's release, essentially leaving AMD a generation behind in performance. The 9500 was a dog and well known for an errata that hampered performance after a microcode update, and the i7 was leaps and bounds ahead of anything else at the time, and is still pretty usable today. My little brother has the 955 and it's showing its age in games (KotK being the worst offender).