14 DAY TRIAL // One week after Intel released the new 45nm processor line, AMD has finally revealed the Spider platform. Although the "box contents" was leaked on the dedicated forums since October, the official release of the Spider platform has just been concluded with the Phenom masterpiece. A few days ago, AMD showed the world the new RV670 GPU, the cornerstone for the ATI Radeon HD3800 video cards family and one of the core components of the Spider high-end gaming platform. The show continued the platform's logic, wrapped around the new 790 FX motherboard chipset that features four PCI Express 2.0 x8 slots, HyperTransport 3.0, as well as support for 1066MHz DDR 2 memory, CrossFireX and AMD Overdrive software for AMD's "Ultimate visual Experience".
The heart of the new platform are the new quad-core Phenom X4 processor chips, that come in two flavors: X4 9600 (2.3GHz) and X4 9500 (2.2GHz). Equipped with the AM2+ socket and a total of 2MB of L2 cache, the processor has been constantly delayed for about a year. Meant to be the AMD response to Intel's Core 2 processor line, the Phenom is the first AMD quad-core processor and, at the same time, the world's first native quad-core design.
AMD launched the new platform almost stealthily. There was nothing to resemble Intel's Penryn glamor. That should not be a surprise, since the manufacturers themselves didn't know what they would launch: there were rumors about either 2.8GHz or 2.6GHz, that dropped to 2.6GHz or 2.4GHz, while the final launch frequencies were at 2.2GHz and 2.3GHz. The 9700 series, that were supposed to operate at 2.4 GHz, had to be pulled off the selves because the company found an errata in the TLB (Transition Lookaside Buffer) that leads to system freeze while all four cores are running at 100% load.