Performance per core does not scale as well as with an Athlon 64 X2 core between 2.2 and 2.8 GHz. This means that the performance gains of Phenom at future clock speeds will not be as significant as they have been with Athlon 64 X2 in the past. Let me give you some numbers to give you a better feeling: Athlon 64 X2 wins in 18 of our benchmarks, while Phenom 9000 only scales better in four categories. I would also like to emphasize that we used Asus's BIOS version 0603, which does not include a fix to the Phenom's TLB bug. Hence Phenom runs without any performance limitations.
Still, it's important to remember that my statements on the inferior scaling of Phenom relates to only a single processing core; looking at the entire processor with four cores (Phenom 9000) or three cores (Phenom 7000, expected later in Q1), Phenom does and will continue to outperform the Athlon 64 X2. Also, no one will actually run Phenom with only a single processing core, and benchmarking with only a single core also doesn't measure potential performance benefits introduced by the shared L3 cache when multiple cores access and modify the same data.
