It has been over 3 years since AMD lost the desktop performance wars to Intel on the desktop. At times things were much worse such as when Penryn came out and the original Phenom architecture seemed to be a pretty big flop. As we all know Phenom II however is a great match for Penryn when it comes to price and performance and especially bundled with ATI branded video cards and motherboards there are quite a few deals out there. That said AMD is still far from reaching the performance of Core i7 but they continue to ramp things up with the Phenom II architecture. Today AMD is releasing the newest and fastest desktop processor from them yet, the Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition.

The Phenom II X4 965 features almost no real differences in technical specs from the previously released X4 955 processor other than the 200MHz bump in default clock to 3.4GHz, a higher max TDP of 140W shows up again, and AMD says it should be a better overclocker than the 955 processor. What that means and you'll see in testing is a slight bump in performance but this isn't anything wildly different from what we've seen. AMD seems to have already scaled down their new architecture to both their new Athlon II brand and the Phenom II dual cores so there's less room to fill in the line-up as well.

Here are the technical specifications on this new processor from AMD.

Phenom™ II X4 965 Black Edition Processor Specifications:

Model Number & Core Frequency: 3.4GHz

Official Pricing at Launch: $245 (US)

Tray OPN: TRAY OPN# HDZ965FBK4DGI

Processor in a Box OPN: PIB OPN# HDZ965FBGIBOX

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: 65o Celsius

Nominal Voltage: 0.825-1.425V

Max TDP: 140 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