Thread: The AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition

AMD's new Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition is the fastest member of the Phenom II family of quad core CPUs. The previous king of the Phenom II line-up was the X4 810 with a clock speed of 2.6GHz, however the X4 955 BE makes a massive leap to 3.2GHz.



Phenom II is very similar to the original Phenom and also the revised version that fixed the TLB problem. The fabrication process has shrunk from 65nm to 45nm and this reduction in the size of the transistors has freed up enough space to allow an increase in L2 cache from 2MB in Phenom to either 4MB or 6MB in Phenom II.

The other major change has been made to the integrated memory controller. Phenom worked with DDR2-1066 but Phenom II can also use DDR3-1333. AMD has come up with a scheme where Phenom II is supplied in Socket AM2+ form for DDR2 motherboards and also in a new Socket AM3 for DDR3 motherboards.