Month: August 2009

Seems to me there’s been a lot of hyper-ventilating about AMD’s Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition with some implying it’s an overclocker’s dream. My friends at XBit Labs have taken a close look at what’s possible (HERE) and concluded:

“…[The] new Phenom II X4 965 working at 3.4 GHz frequency is pretty much as fast as Core 2 Quad Q9550 at 2.83 GHz nominal speed and fall behind Core i7-920 with even lower nominal frequency of 2.66 GHz. So, AMD CPUs lose to Intel competitors quite significantly in IPC (instructions per clock). It is this particular fact, but not the insufficiently high clock speeds, that do not allow AMD solutions to find their way into the high-end price segments.

Moreover, considering that Phenom II X4 965 has increased to 140 W typical heat dissipation, its launch seems even more to be the “last resort”. We obviously shouldn’t expect Phenom II X4 processor family to speed up any further, at least until new Deneb core stepping comes out (which we have no information of so far). So, Phenom II X4 965 will most likely remain the fastest quad-core AMD processor for a while. And within this period of time Intel may not only expand their Lynnfield processor family, but also start production of 32 nm technologies. In other words, while today we reviewed Phenom II X4 965 as a mainstream solution, in the near future Phenom II X4 processor family will have be just a low-cost quad-core offering, like first generation Phenom X4 CPUs.”

Sounds like too little, too late.