Officially, it can work stable at 5920MHz

Nov 25, 2008 15:33 GMT  ·  By

Advanced Micro Device's upcoming Phenom II X4 processor keeps on surprising us these days with its overclocking capabilities. Only a few days ago it was reported to enter POST while clocked over 5GHz; this time we learn that it has managed to reach 6.3GHz while remaining stable. It seems that the company wanted to keep this number unofficial, and asked people to change it to “more than 5GHz”.

The latest news on the Web shows that the upcoming Deneb chip is at least capable of delivering speeds close to 6GHz, if not surpassing that barrier. No information regarding the system used to test the speed has been published or anything on the cooling solution used, yet it appears that some people managed to make it work quite stable at 5920MHz. Even so, the chip is capable of amazing speeds, out pacing even Intel's Core i7, which is known to have been pushed to 5.3GHz.

The Sunnyvale company failed a few times before while going against Intel's Core 2 Duo and Quad Core chips, yet it seems that these guys have managed to get things right. Phenom II X4 is the first desktop processor AMD releases under the 45nm process technology, but it comes one year after the first similar CPUs from Intel. Thus, the chip maker had to be sure everything was perfect, and all points towards the fact that it has succeeded.

Intel released its latest Core i7 chips under the new Nehalem architecture more than a week ago, and the CPU is doing very well on the performance charts, only that it may look rather expensive to some. The processor works only paired with an X58 motherboard, which means that users who wish to acquire the chip have to purchase the motherboard as well. AMD respected the rules of the game on the price part as well, and made the CPU compatible with the already existing AM2 and AM2+ motherboards, offering users a cheaper and faster upgrade process.

On related news, we learned that the Sunnyvale chip maker is planning to launch two Phenom II X4 models in January. The flavors will be AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition (HDZ940XCGIBOX), 3.00 GHz, Socket AM2+, 8 MB cache (2 MB total L2 + 6 MB L3), 125W TDP and AMD Phenom II X4 920 (HDX920XCGIBOX), 2.80 GHz, Socket AM2+, 8 MB cache (2 MB total L2 + 6 MB L3), 125W TDP.