AMD Phenom II X4 920 processor review @ Elite Bastards

[news 28]

 

Hi everyone,

 

It's been a tough couple of years for AMD's CPU division - First their Barcelona architecture and Phenom processors based around them were delayed, then the initial stepping of said processors were found to have a bug which crippled performance when worked around. Couple that with disappointing clock speeds and poor overclocking (until the introduction of Advanced Clock Calibration on later AMD motherboard chipsets at least) and you found yourself with a far from compelling solution. Today, AMD looks to change all that with the release of their first Phenom II CPUs - Sporting a larger cache, a 45 nanometre manufacturing process, and myriad other improvements to boost performance over their predecessors. So, is this the architecture AMD needs to get back on terms with Intel in the CPU market? We take a look at the Phenom II X4 920 to find out.

 

 

AMD Phenom II X4 920 prcoessor review

 

"Starting with the use of a 45 nanometre process, both Phenom II CPUs launched today have been manufactured on a 45nm process with silicon-on-insulator technology, giving all the usual benefits of such a die shrink such as a reduction in die size, power consumption and thus heat generated. What's more, AMD have made use of an immersion lithography manufacturing technology for these parts, making for an overall manufacturing process that AMD claims will serve them well not only for this particular architecture, but also for future CPU architectures and process changes, particularly as they look forward to 32 nanometre as their next big process jump. In the short term though, the immersion lithography technology showcased here is cited as one of the main reasons for AMD's ability to reach higher clock speeds, with tighter tolerances and lower leakages of current than previous parts - Considering the struggle first-generation Phenom parts had to even get close to 3.0GHz, this

is very good news indeed, and AMD seem confident that these initial Phenom II processors have a lot of headroom to play with in overclocking terms."

 

http://www.elitebastards.com/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=667&Itemid=27

 

 

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Regards,

Hanners

Elite Bastards

 

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