14 DAY TRIAL // We have told you earlier this morning that there might be a problem with the third stepping of the AMD Phenom processor. French hardware site Erenumerique reported that AMD officials told them that the company received the first B3 revision of the Phenom silicon.
To cut the story short for those living under their rocks, the Translation Lookaside Buffer errata that decimated the Phenom and then the Barcelona shipments could not be fixed via the microcode injection patch the company has readied back in December 2007. The only hope for the CPUs to function normally at their full speed was to have their L3 cache redesigned in the following CPU stepping.
The Erenumerique guys (the French equivalent for the Digital Era) claimed that the above-mentioned AMD officials whispered in their ear during the Consumer Electronics Show that the Phenom's B3 silicon had been tested and the disastrous bug continued to occur every time the CPU reached full load. The same French sources alleged that the Phenoms will be fixed at last in the B4 stepping.
AMD made it clear a few hours after the rumors made way. AMD's Pat Moorehead clearly stated that the B3 revision is not buggy at all. As expected, since the processor's errata has been fixed, there will be no B4 stepping ever. The next silicon stepping will be Cx, to feature 45-nanometer Shanghai cores. The B3 stepping will put an end to both the TLB bug and to the 65-nanometer technological process.
The B3 processors are slated for production late in the first quarter, with mass availability scheduled for Q2. The two other CPUs, the Phenom 9700 and Phenom 9900, are still delayed to the second quarter of the year. There is no possible reason for the delay in the light of the new information, as previously it was rumored that the mentioned CPUs are put on hold because of the B3 stepping being "ill".