AMD Beefs Up the Dragon, Intros Phenom II X4 955

After much anticipation and a series of leaked details surfacing the Internet over the last few weeks, Sunnyvale, California-based Advanced Micro Devices has just announced its latest addition to its most recent line of Phenom II processors. As anticipated, the chip maker's newest quad-core processor is dubbed Phenom II X4 955 and is part of the performance-oriented Black Edition series. Said to be AMD's fastest ever quad-core processor, the new Phenom II X4 955 is expected to deliver an impressive performance level, even when compared to Intel's latest generation of processors, the Nehalem-based quad-core Core i7 920.

As you have probably expected, AMD's new Phenom II X4 is designed to boast an increased core speed of 3.2GHz, a boost over the chip maker's previous flagship model, the Phenom II X4 940. As with all of the company's new generation of Phenom II processors, the 955 is designed using a 45nm manufacturing process and boasts 8MB of cache (with 2MB of L2 cache and 6MB of shared L3 cache). The chip has a thermal envelope of 125W and is compatible with the latest AM3-based motherboards, enabling support for DDR3-1333 memory.

In addition to the launch of its fastest quad-core processor, AMD has also introduced a new quad-core Phenom II X4 945, a 45nm-based CPU that comes with 8MB of cache and the same AM3-socket compatibility. This model can provide the end-user with a clock speed of 3.0GHz and will ultimately replace AMD's current Phenom II X4 940. However, unlike the 940, the new 945 model has been featured with an enhanced HyperTransport speed of 2.0GHz, faster than the 1.8GHz featured on the Phenom II 920 and 940.

The launch of the company's latest Phenom II processor comes after the chip maker introduced its latest Radeon graphics card, the single-GPU Radeon HD 4890. These two products are essentially meant to further increase the performance of the company's highly mediated Dragon platform, which consists of the latest Phenom II processors, Radeon GPUs and AMD's high-performance chipsets. With an MSRP of $245, the new CPU from AMD will compete with Intel's Core i7 920 and Core 2 Quad Q9550.