Reg Hardware

Original URL: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/12/08/amd_rolls_out_first_phenom_2/

AMD rolls out first Phenom IIs

Watch out, Core i7

By Tony Smith

8th December 2008 12:24 GMT

AMD doesn't appear to have said as much itself, but one report claims the chip maker has today formally announced its Phenom II processor.

The claim comes (http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=XB5LHZITWBJ4KQSNDLPCKHSCJUNN2JVN?articleID=212300037) from US site EE Times. Since North American journalists are only now climbing out of bed, we imagine the story comes from a pre-briefing given to the title and presumably scheduled to go live today.

Early or not, the cat's out of the sack, and - as expected (http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/11/28/amd_multi_core_athlon_phenom_ii/) - AMD's latest quad-core desktop offering is a 3GHz chip fabbed at 45nm with a Socket AM3 interconnect and a memory controller capable of connecting to DDR2 and DDR 3 memory, the latter clocked at up to 1333MHz.

AMD is also launching a 65nm version that's limited to DDR 2 and use the Socket AM2+ interconnect.

The 3GHz Phenom II X4 is priced at $275 - a cheaper, $235 version runs at 2.8GHz. EE Times didn't provide the model numbers, but World+Dog knows them to be the 940 and the 920, with the AM3 versions numbered 945 and 925.

Intel Core i7 'Nehalem'
and X58 chipset review (http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/11/03/review_cpu_intel_core_i7/)