Phenom 2 X4 940 Black Edition

AMD is back in the game – more or less.

Back in the day AMD was the performance CPU of choice for many enthusiasts – but Intel changed that two years ago. Is it time for the Green Team to once more reign supreme? Do they have something new and solid to bring to the game, or is this just a token offering to appease the diehard fans? Should you even care?

The launch of the original Phenom processor was meant to be AMD’s answer to Intel’s Core 2 – a native quad-core processor. This meant that the four cores were part of the one die, and weren’t simply a twin dual-core solution on the one package. It was ambitious, it was difficult and, ultimately, it wasn’t good enough. Intel managed to steamroll over AMD with performance and pricing in every market gap (aside from the very budget parts), something that caused many fanboys to convert to the other side.

The Phenom II is everything that the original Phenom should have been. First though, let’s take a look at this chip in more detail, starting with the tech inside it.

Codenamed ‘Deneb’, this chip has four cores that are integrated on the one die. Each core is given 64K of instruction, and 64K of data cache, inside which is stored the information needed for the processor’s calculations. This is fed by 512KB of L2 cache per core, and in turn is fed by a shared pool of 6MB that is accessible by any core at any time.

There’s a total of 758 million transistors inside this chip too, 27 million more than Nehalem has. We’re not too sure where the extra transistors have come into play, but we can only assume that architectural differences account for this. What we do know is that the chip is manufactured in 45nm, constructed at Fab 36 in Dresden, Germany. It retains support for AM2+, which means that if you’ve already got a mobo and memory to support this then all you need to do is simply swap out the CPU!

Ease of upgrade has always been a mainstay and drawcard for AMD, something that you’re not going to get as easily with the Big Blue. Support for DDR2 is the same as the original Phenom, but speeds are now up to 1066.

Now, it’s time to get down to the performance, and whether or not this is something that you’re going to be interested in buying. For comparison’s sake, we’ll compare this chip to an Intel E8400 – the mainstay for Intel builders for the past few months due to its affordability.