AMD's Phenom II X4 850 CPU to Become Official in a Few Weeks' Time

Even though, right now, everyone's attention is turned towards the high-performance Bulldozer CPUs that are expected to ship at the beginning of the summer, AMD is still developing new Phenom II and Athlon II processors and one of the first chips scheduled to arrive on the market is the Phenom II X4 850.

When AMD launches the new chip, this will become the fastest 800-series Phenom II processor in AMD's lineup since its operating frequency will be set at 3.3GHz, 100Mhz more than the current Phenom II X4 840.

Apart from the clock change, the rest of the chip will remain identical with the X4 840, as they both are based on the C3 revision of the Propus core.

This core was designed by AMD to be used inside Athlon II processors and made its transition to the Phenom II line with the introduction of the X4 840.

Its most distinctive feature is the lack of a Level 3 cache and it comes equipped with 512KB of L1 cache (separated into an instruction and data cache) and 2MB of L2 cache memory.

The chip also packs an integrated memory controller that supports DDR3 and DDR2 memory (up to 1333MHz and 1066MHz, respectively), the 3.0 version of the HyperTransport technology and its NB is clocked at 2GHz.

The processor is built using the 45nm SOI fabrication technology and its TDP is rated at 95W.

AMD's Phenom II X4 850 is expected to become official in just a few weeks time, but its pricing is still unknown.

In addition to this chip, AMD is also expected to release two other Phenom II processors, a new flagship CPU that goes by the name of Phenom II X4 980 Black Edition and its fastest dual-core CPU to date, the Phenom II X2 570 Black Edition. (via Donanim Haber)