If you're reading this review the odds are you're probably very aware that times have not been great for AMD's processor business for about 2.5 years which is a lifetime in the technology world. ATI, which they acquired in 2006, also it had seemed had a similar fate until this summer when they not only bested their main competitor but they did so by slashing prices dramatically from the level they were at. AMD also has some new products that are coming under wraps today with the Phenom II processor which may not change the game the way the Radeon 4000 series did but is the most competitive AMD has been in some time.

The processors launching today from AMD are the Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition and Phenom II X4 920. Naming schemes have changed again dramatically and as you might be aware their naming scheme now matches identically to Intel's new Core i7 with their 920 and 940. This isn't the first time we've seen this in the processor realm but you have to go back some time until AMD they were so exactly similar. A little disappointing but we assume of course the intention is to draw the average consumer towards the similarly titled product. We're not sure how well it work but it's worth a shot.

The major change in Phenom II is that it is built using a 45nm immersion lithography manufacturing process which, "enables higher frequencies, tighter tolerances and lower current leakage." The other major change is the L3 cache which is now three times as large at 6MB over 2MB of Phenom and the L3 cache is also 2-cycles faster. There are a number of other improvements as well, ACC (Advanced Clock Calibration) is now apparently baked into the silicon so a SB750 chipset is not required to get more overclocking headroom out of the Phenom II.  Another thing to note is the HT bus on these new processors runs at 1.8GHz instead of 2GHz of the 9950 due to a trade off in priorities to get the chip ready to market. The bus isn't even close to being saturated with anything but servers so this isn't a major loss.

This however does bring us to the AM3 versions of the Phenom II which will support 2GHz HyperTransport bus speeds and should be out just a few months from now. These processors will work in Socket AM2+ motherboards that are certified and support the upcoming Socket AM3 with DDR3 memory support. AMD is letting people know about this ahead of time in case they want to wait but we don't expect a major shift in performance with DDR3 and it still is much more expensive than DDR2 which is dirt cheap currently. Here's the full list from AMD.

Major feature enhancements for 45nm AMD Phenom II:

Enhanced Total Cache: 8MB (L2 + L3)
Cool'n'Quiet 3.0 Technology: Additional power states, significantly (~40%) lower idle power and lower power consumption under moderate loads
Increased frequency: AMD Phenom II 940 3.0GHz @ 125W TDP
Massive headroom using extreme and experimental cooling techniques


Major silicon enhancements for 45nm AMD Phenom II:

45nm immersion lithography manufacturing technology enables higher frequencies, tighter tolerances and lower current leakage
6MB L3 cache (up from 65nm Phenom's 2MB)
2-cycles faster than 65nm Phenom L3
Increased DRAM bandwidth
Cache flush on halt: Core's L1 and L2 flush into shared L3 after a core enters a halt state allowing the core to drop to a lower speed and save power
Path-based indirect branch prediction
2x increase in core probe bandwidth
Larger load/store buffering / larger floating point buffering / reduced MAB (missed buffer) lifetime
Improved LOCK pipelineing: (LOCK is an instruction prefix) this improves performance when multiple LOCKS are in process simultaneously
FP MOV compute optimization: Floating point register-to-register move instruction improvements


AMD Phenom II X4 940 and 920 Processor Specifications:
Processor Frequency: X4 940 (Black Edition) = 3.0GHz / X4 920 = 2.8GHz
L1 Cache Sizes: 64K of L1 instruction and 64K of L1 data cache per core (512KB total L1 per processor)

L2 Cache Sizes: 512KB of L2 data cache per core (2MB total L2 per processor)

L3 Cache Size: 6MB (shared)
Memory Controller Type: Integrated 128-bit wide memory controller *
Memory Controller Speed: Up to 1.8GHz with Dual Dynamic Power Management
Types of Memory Supported: Support for unregistered DIMMs up to PC2 8500 (DDR2-1066MHz)
Memory Bandwidth: Up to 17.1GB
HyperTransport 3.0 Link: One 16-bit/16-bit link @ up to 3.6GHz full duplex (1.8GHz x2)

HyperTransport 3.0 Bandwidth: Up to 14.4GB/s
Total Processor Bandwidth: Up to 31.5 GB/s total bandwidth
Packaging: Socket AM2+ 940-pin organic micro pin grid array (micro-PGA)

Fab location: Fab 36 wafer fabrication facilities in Dresden, Germany

Process Technology: 45-nanometer DSL SOI (silicon-on-insulator) technology
Approximate Transistor count: ~ 758 million (45nm)
Approximate Die Size: 258 mm2 (45nm)
Max Ambient Case Temp: 62o Celsius
Nominal Voltage: 0.875 - 1.5 Volts
Max TDP: 125 Watts
*NOTE: MC configurable for dual 64-bit channels for simultaneous read/writes