Phenom II available before Xmas!

AMD fanbois rejoice! Your chip is come - and sooner than you thought. UPDATED: Local releases confirmed.

Distributors in Europe and North America will begin shipping both OEM and retail boxes of the Phenom II 920 and Phenom II 940 starting December 18th (Europe), according to one distributor, and December 20th (North America).

The Phenom II X4 920 SKU will sell at about $US235 to retailers, while the overclocking whiz-kid, the Phenom II X4 940 will ship at $US275. At least one distributor says December 20th is the ETA for the shipment.

As far as we can tell, pricing in Europe will be around €220 for the 920 but will become available from the 18th. We couldn’t get a pricing on the 940, though, but we’d expect it to be in the €250-265 range. Add tax to these numbers, if you will.

This puts the Phenom II X4 940 just under the Core 2 Quad 9550, while the Phenom II X4 920 will undercut the Q9400. We expect that Intel will slash prices just before Christmas.

So those of you who wrote letters to Saint Nick asking for Phenom II, might get your wishes after all.

We couldn’t get hold of AMD for a comment, and we're still chatting to local Aussie disties to see if the story's the same here? The current NDA for Phenom II reviews is January 9, so we've got to wonder how that's going to hold up...

Edited to add: We've spoken with our local AMD man, Garrath Johnson - Technical Manager - and he informed us that the local release will follow the same pattern as elsewhere.

"This [news] relates to distributor stock. We are working very hard to ensure that Phenom II is widely available at launch on the 8th of January," he told us when we passed on the news from OS. "This, along with motherboard/BIOS availability, will mean that people wanting to buy are not disappointed."

Xmas just might be coming early.