Maximum PC - March 2009

Phenom Reimagined

AMD’s trip back to the drawing board

he Phenom launch certainly
didn’t go as AMD had planned.
Rather than christening a new line
that would change the company’s
fortunes, AMD CEO Hector Ruiz
broke a bottle of champagne over
the bow of a ship that promptly sank
beneath the waves—but only after
smashing into a nearby pier holding a
bait shop and a busload of tourists.
Phenom was a year late and had a
performance-crippling TLB bug, yield
issues, and a performance gap with
Intel’s older generation of CPUs.

Fast-forward a year and the picture looks far different for the underdog chip-maker. Phenom II is actually ahead of schedule. And doubts about overclocking were quashed months ago when the company invited elite overclockers to its headquarters to get medieval on the new chip with liquid nitrogen and other exotic toys. The result? Overclocking feats that exceeded 5GHz.

Not to belabor the sequel talk, but it’s clear that AMD doesn’t intend for its pair of new Phenom II chips to be cheesy follow-ups. These CPUs are intended to erase all doubts that the original chip created and help quell uneasiness about the company’s ability to make good parts.

THE DYNAMIC DUO The Phenom II family consists of two CPUs: the 2.8GHz Phenom II X4 920 and the 3GHz Phenom X4 940 Black Edition. Both use the company’s new 45nm process and can be paired with the majority of Socket AM2+ boards (and even some AM2 boards.) Both CPUs are native quad-core designs with all four execution cores residing on a monolithic die. AMD will continue its

practice of repackaging defective quad-core dies as tri-cores (denoted with X3 rather than X4).

NEW UNDER THE HOOD For the most part, Phenom II isn’t a radical departure from Phenom. It has the same basic core and still features

Clock Speed L1 Cache (total) L2 Cache (total) L3 Cache (total Front-side bus/ Interconnect Speed Execution Cores Process Technology Transistors Die Size Wholesale Price Interface TDP* 2 Memory Support