Well the phenom chip has been an epic failure and also a good success for the AMD team but still giving the consumer more choice to have either the quad core bases Intel core2 which is quite expensive but sports neat features like raw CPU performance and unbeatable scores while AMD in the other hand some improvements when going towards the new Phenom II series with the new X4 series running at the max 3.0Ghz first of AMD’s kind to go that far and even able to go even higher with some technology enhancement. But for those people who have some problem buying or at least dreaming to have a quad core processor in either AMD or Intel, and want something in between the dual cores and the more expensive and powerful quad, and better have a triple core alternative, and AMD made that fit in the hole.
Meet the new AMD Phenom II X3 720 black edition form AMD, sporting only three independent core and shrunk the core size in to the previous 65nm architecture to the 45nm Intel standard core fabrication process. And also being a refurbished technology from the previous Phenom chip, we could help but find out that the TBL bug is being fixed or not or if another type of bug has crawled into place and wait for anyone to find out. But before that the core specs of the AMD phenom X3: The Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition processor operates at 2.8GHz and features the full 6 MB of L3 cache, which makes this processor have the same amount of cache as the quad cores! Since the cache is shared, AMD can have three cores running and not have to lose any of the Level 3 cache, which means each core now has more cache than even the more expensive quad-core processors! Each individual core still features 64 KB of L1 Data cache, 64 KB of L1 Instruction cache, and 512 KB of L2 cache. Another bonus of having just three active cores is the fact that this is a 95 Watt TDP part, which is lower than the 125 Watt TDP Phenom II X4 processors.
For the test show that the X3 showed minute progress with much higher clock yields, even at single thread the higher clock cycle helped it propel over the previous phenom, just going as fast as the E7500 in most single thread applications but in more multithreading apps it came a little shy of last but definitely beating most of the cheap competition from Intel. Gamings however haven’t moved yet with still a bottleneck over the graphics card, but just over the recommended playable frame. Overall the Phenom II processor is much better from the previous core processors in the older Phenom range, in all of the problems like a lower frequency, and the TBL bug is all long gone, better enough that the Phenom can upgrade to the newer DDR3 memory increase the latency yield we could expect a comeback for AMD.
