14 DAY TRIAL // A little more than a month ago, on May 3 to be more precise, AMD unveiled its fastest Phenom II processors to date, the X4 980, but a month after its official release the CPU still isn't available for purchase from any on-line or brick and mortar retailer.
According to CPU-World, the only way to get your hands on a Phenom II 980 BE is to place an order on several small online shops which seem to be able to bring this as a special request.
The Phenom II X4 980 Black Edition processor is based on the Daneb core and it comes clocked at 3.7GHz, 100MHz higher than the previous X4 975 BE that arrived in early 2011.
Outside of the increased clock speed, the chip doesn't differ too much from AMD's other processors based on the Daneb architecture and it features the same 125W TDP as its lower clocked brothers.
The chip also sports 512KB of L2 data cache per core, 6MB of shared Level 3 cache memory, an integrated dual-channel DDR2 and DDR3-1333MHz memory controller and HyperTransport 3.0 support.
Since the Phenom II X4 980 comes as a Black Edition part, the processor features an unlocked multiplier, which should enable it to reach higher overclocks.
Together with the X4 980 BE, AMD also released four other Athlon II and Phenom II parts, and most of them share the same faith as they are almost impossible to get a hold of.
The only exception to this rule is the Athlon II X3 460, which emerged in stores in the last day or two.
This is not the first time that AMD has problems delivering its fastest Phenom II processors to market, as the previously launched X4 975 BE also suffered from similar availability issues.