14 DAY TRIAL // The Phenom family has taken AMD through a lot of pain since the official unveiling. We have talked about the TLB errata that affect any Phenom running at more than 2.3 GHz to cause serious faults in the L3 cache allocation. Finally, this makes the whole system freeze, and of course, users tear the hairs off their heads.
The Phenom 9700 series could not make it to the market because of this issue and has been postponed until further orders. However, a leaked AMD internal note revealed that AMD Phenom 9700, 2.4 GHz processor is to become available starting mid-December. The Phenom 9600 series to run at 2.3GHz has been slated for general availability starting the first quarter of the next year.
AMD's desktop product marketing manager Michael Saucier confirmed that all the Phenoms are subject to the same TLB issue and that AMD is currently working on a microcode fix. This patch would decrease the 9700's performance with up to 10 percent, to maintain the maximum CPU clock under 2.4 GHz.
The chip maker has launched the Spider platform back in November. It included the Phenom processor, the RD790 chipset and the RV670 graphics processor, and shortly after, MSI announced the first Phenom-Ready motherboard built around the RD790 chipset, the MSI K9A2 Platinum. Asus and Gigabyte motherboards to support Phenom quad-core processors (as well as the "defective" tri-cores) have been announced since early October.
The Phenom 9700 is about to land, which should be a reason to celebrate. Nevertheless, it seems that the MSI K9A2 Platinum, which is the favorite Phenom-Ready motherboard at AMD, is not to be found at all on the market. Moreover, rumors had it that there was a design error and the motherboard manufacturing had been ceased. MSI however denied the allegations and made it clear that the board was in high demand and had sold out. The manufacturer will start shipping again next week, just in time for the arrival of the 9700 Phenom.