With the Intel choices over with the AMD alternative is in the hard side to have to use in the perfect rig, with the Phenom going to go in just a few months or so because of some low stock clock problem and also the TBL bug that the caches are all plagued in the older phenoms. So the Phenom II processor from AMD is going to be the new gen quad core processors and it can be a new phase for the AMD users ready to buy the new processor but I am really concerned in the use of the AM3 socket and people are going to be ill informed that which of the AMD series chipsets are up to the task of the AM3 socket and support of the DDR3 memory.
But with the going to the future the Phenom, I am going to look at is the latest Phenom II BE 940. But most of the cores like the other Phenoms chips have some problems with the stock frequency only going as much as 2.6GHz in the former Black edition 9950 the new 940Be is at the peak 3.0GHz core clock stepping up the stock speeds up to where the QX9650 is, but with the Phenom II 940 has improved the fabrication process and by having the core die go down from 65nm to the smaller 45nm giving it a newer step against the Intel core 2 Quads or even the entry level core 7i. Plus the CPU has going a better feature added like the advance clock calibration, to increase the yield of an over-clocked core frequency by about another one hundred MHz, giving more headroom for much needed increase in raw performance, and also the increase L3 cache by about another 4MB giving it a shared memory size of 6MB just par with the Dual core’s in Intel. But also the Phenom II chip has a higher core frequency and another feature that tells all of the data in the L1 and L2 caches to dump it in the L3 cache for a temporary halt when idle or in hibernation state, greatly reducing the power consumption and frequency as a whole going down to 800MHz and a voltage countdown to 0.4V.
But much of it must be the performance gains in the new Phenom chip, by having the core at stock 3GHz it came up better in both multi and single thread form the other Phenoms and also decoding and other apps went much better with the new features in the phenom II gave it a good lead out of the Phenom 9950. But this is not a Intel killer just yet, but beats in over-clocking capabilities in just 3.9GHz in air is good indication it is in the lead to higher clock yields, it can be disappointing for me to put this in the last of the list.
