Phenom II 940 Review: Clock for clock Deneb vs. Yorkfield
Date: 1/31/2009
Category: CPUs
Author: Casey Dougherty
Phenom II - A Technical Introduction
Phenom II, by JumpingJack
Unless you have been on Mars or trapped on a deserted island for the past six months you are well aware of a global recession and everyone is hurting. As gruesome as the current economic climate appears, the situation has not stopped our favorite high tech companies from generating new products and introducing higher performance parts in a calculated move to squeeze your already squeezed pocketbook. Today we shall take a look at one of the most recent, and anticipated, products -- AMD's sequel to their original quad core, the Phenom II. While Intel uses code names related to geographical locations, AMD's code names generally follow a theme such as cities or stars, such as with Deneb -- the brightest star in the constellation Cygnus.
Similarly, unless you have been living in that constellation for the past year or so, or have been a hermit living in the caves of Saskatchewan you will also know that AMD's first attempt at a native quad core design fell well short of expectations, struggling to compete with their competitors dual dual core - quad solution. The recent introduction of Phenom II looks to change that with an opportunity to introduce some architectural tweaks as well as a new process technology at the 45 nm lithographic node.
The novelties that AMD brings with their new processors, originally released as Shanghai for servers, is larger L3 cache, some tweaks to the core architecture, and a 45 nm technology comprised of two key features -- ultra low-k dielectrics and immersion lithography technology. We will discuss more about the 45 nm portion in a moment.
Taken together, the instruction per clock (IPC) gains and the clock speed improvements, AMD is touting a 20% performance improvement gain over the top bin 65 nm Phenom 9950. AMD has launched Phenom II in two speed bins, one at 2.8 GHz and their multiplier-unlocked black edition at 3.0 GHz. Both clock speeds are a significant improvement over the 65 nm counterpart, and in the months/weeks leading up to launch AMD was most certainly eager to demonstrate the vastly improved clock headroom their new 45 nm process affords. Using extreme cooling measures such as liquid nitrogen and phase change technology, AMD has demonstrated parts functioning in excess of 6GHz. Before we launch right into benchmarks and performance, let's take a closer look at what AMD has put into this new CPU.
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