Down from 125W

Jul 23, 2009 10:02 GMT  ·  By

Earlier this year, at the end of April, the world's second largest chip maker, Advanced Micro Devices, announced the introduction of the much anticipated Phenom II X4 955 processor, coming to provide users with enhanced speeds and overclocking capability. The introduction of said chip was accompanied by the launch of another, previously-rumored model, the Phenom II X4 945, featuring a lower clock speed and a more affordable price tag. Both CPUs came with support for the chip maker's latest AM3 platform and featured TDP levels of over 100W. However, it now appears AMD has updated the latter with a lower TDP, providing users with a choice for a cooler-running processor.

The updated Phenom II X4 945 seems to have been silently rolled out by the Sunnyvale, California-based chip maker, which has recently announced two new Athlon II X2 245 and 240 processors, featuring support for AM3 platforms. From what we can tell, the new Phenom II X4 945 CPU features the same technical specifications and is priced the same as the original 945, but comes with a TDP of just 95W, down from 125W available in the initial model.

To clear things up a bit, the Phenom II X4 945 now boasts a clock speed of 3.0GHz, which could be easily increased by a few MHz by those overclocking enthusiasts, 2MB of L2 cache and 6MB of L3 cache, while the TDP is set at the aforementioned 95W. Price wise, you are looking at a quad-core processor built on AMD's efficient 45nm manufacturing process that is priced at about US$225.

We are not yet sure whether the world's second largest chip maker will do the same with some of its other high-end processors, including the Phenom II X4 955 or the flagship PII X4 965.