14 DAY TRIAL // When Intel came forth with the Core microarchitecture, everybody was simply delighted at the fact that a processor could overclock to as much as 100% of its stock frequency by using air cooling alone. But back then, AMD had only the K8 architecture to show off and people were already aware of what its capabilities were. So Intel got almost 90% of the x86 processors market, while AMD was left with a trail of breadcrumbs to help them get back on their way.
But then the dreaded K10 microarchitecture came, bound to take the bull by the horns and shake things up a little bit. As far as speculations go, there were a lot of them made on this subject, but it seems that the guys from Fudzilla.com got their hands on an Agena processor and took it for a severe regime of testing.
The model made its way in their hands through some unknown paths, but the good thing is that it did. It's an 1.9GHz Agena processor; this model works on an AM2 motherboard; the CPU-Z 1.39 utility recognizes it as being Opteron 148, but it is also able to distinguish the 65nm manufacturing process and the 1.273V voltage, alongside with four cores, each sporting an individual 64KB L1 cache, a 512KB L2 cache, and also a 2MB L3 cache.
After the initial "eyes gazing, mouth wide open" routine went away, they took the CPU for some testing, the main one being its overclocking ability, or, better said, overclockability factor. With the multiplier left "unharmed" at 9.5, they were able to raise the bus speed all the way to 320MHz, which meant a 3042MHz resulting CPU frequency. During this time the voltage wasn't increased much, but the CPU-Z screenshot could have caught a voltage fluctuation, as it might happen, or the core voltage could have been adjusted a little bit, because it read 1.297V. Anyway, with these numbers at hand, AMD might, just might be able to pull this off and stand a chance before Intel. Right now, even if they admit it or not, they're on the edge of a cliff and it's slippery, so a balancing act is in order. Stay tuned, more to come as things further develop.
