Although they seem still quite fresh, AMD's Socket AM3 Phenom II processors have been on the market now for two and a half months and although the Phenom II X4 810 hasn't been too spectacular the Phenom II X3 720 BE has been a hit with a higher default clockspeed and an unlocked multiplier at a great price. However, at the high-end AMD still has had the Phenom II X4 940 Socket AM2+ processor at the top running at 3GHz. That is until now as AMD now has a Socket AM3 processor as their flagship platform, the AMD Phenom II X4 955.

In case you have forgotten or haven't been keeping up, AMD's AM3 processors will work fine in Socket AM2+ motherboards. AMD has been heavily pushing the lifespan of their Socket and architecture, something which Intel can't lay claim to leaving the Socket 775 market for dead and splitting up future platforms into two markets, the LGA 1366 and LGA1160 which means more motherboards to buy and less backwards compatibility.

There are actually two new processors AMD is launching today, the Phenom II X4 955 and 945, both Socket AM3 processors with 125W TDP rating with the 955 running at 3.2GHz and the 945 at 3GHz. The 955 is 200MHz higher clock than AMD's previous best, the 940, and both run at a HyperTransport bus speed of 2GHz. The 940 ran at 1.8GHz. The chips feature 64KB of L1 cache per core, 512KB of L2, and 6MB shared L3 cache on top. As with all Phenom II's it is built on AMD's 45nm DSL SOI process which seems to be maturing to release a 3.2GHz processor

So not much is new other than Socket AM3 processor being AMD's best now. More so what's interesting is the software AMD has to go with Phenom, AMD Overdrive 3.0 beta should be out with this processor or if not on the way soon. It allows for custom profiles for say focusing on overclocking two cores for programs that only use two cores and lowering the other two cores to save power and maximize those cores. There are a number of built-in profiles and you can also add your own. We didn't get a chance to test this but we did lower the third and fourth core as low as possible to see if it effected our max overclock of a single or dual core which unfortunately it did not. To skip ahead a bit, 4GHZ is where we topped out, four cores or one core.

AMD also have updated AMD Overdrive with what they call Black Edition memory profiles for DDR3 memory.This will verify your RAM against an online database and adjust it for the maximum values. Pretty cool, right? Unfortunately the only Socket AM3 board we had in house wasn't quite stable with the 955 so this is another feature we'll have to look at later on. It is good to see AMD focus on the enthusiast and we recommend all owners of AMD CPUs check out Overdrive as it is great software.

Since not much is new let's move onto the technical specifications.



NEW Phenom™ II X4 Processor Specifications:
Model Number & Core Frequency: X4 955 Black Edition = 3.2GHz
Model Number & Core Frequency: X4 945 = 3.0GHz
X4 955 Black Edition OPN: TRAY OPN# HDZ955FBK4DGI
X4 955 Black Edition OPN: PIB OPN# HDZ955FBGIBOX
X4 945 OPN: TRAY OPN# HDX945FBK4DGI
X4 945 OPN: PIB OPN# HDX945FBGIBOX
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)
Total Cache (L2+L3): 8MB
Memory Controller Type: Integrated 128-bit wide memory controller *
Memory Controller Speed: Up to 2.0GHz with Dual Dynamic Power Management
Types of Memory Supported: Unregistered DIMMs up to PC2-8500 (DDR2-1066MHz) -AND- PC3-10600 (DDR3-1333MHz)

HyperTransport 3.0 Specification: One 16-bit/16-bit link @ up to 4.0GHz full duplex (2.0GHz x2)
Total Processor-to-System Bandwidth: Up to 37.3GB/s total bandwidth [Up to 21.3 GB/s memory bandwidth (DDR3-1333) + 16.0GB/s (HT3)]

Up to 33.1GB/s total bandwidth [Up to 17.1 GB/s memory bandwidth (DDR2-1066) + 16.0GB/s (HT3)]

Packaging: Socket AM3 938-pin organic micro pin grid array (micro-PGA)
Fab location: GLOBALFOUNDARIES Fab 1 module 1 in Dresden, Germany (formerly AMD Fab 36)

Process Technology: 45-nanometer DSL SOI (silicon-on-insulator) technology
Approximate Die Size: 258 mm2
Approximate Transistor count: ~ 758 million
Max Temp: 62o Celsius
Nominal Voltage: 0.875-1.5V
Max TDP: 125 Watts

*Notes:
Black Edition processors support software-selectable increases to memory controller, HyperTransport, DDR3 and CPU core frequency

MC configurable for dual 64-bit channels for simultaneous read/writes
For DDR3-1333, AMD Phenom II supports 1-DIMM-per-channel @ 1333MHz