Thursday, November 20, 2008

AMD'S 45 nm PHENOM II CHIPS OVERCLOCKED TO 6+GHz


Hold the phone on handing the CPU performance crown to Intel's new Core i7 processors just yet -- the chip giant may yet have a fight on its hands in the coming months.
Advanced Micro Devices demoed its upcoming 45-nanometer "Deneb" desktop chips -- now confirmed as Phenom II -- for reviewers in Austin, Texas, on Thursday, and reports are in that AMD overclockers were able to achieve clock speeds north of 6 GHz on the second-generation quad-core devices.

Respecting AMD's wishes, we'll just point out that PC Perspective's story now says, "The Phenom II reached WELL over 5.x GHz (read: REALLY over)." And another source gives a more specific number -- 6.3GHz, though again, that could not be confirmed by AMD. BLOGS
The Channel Wire
November 20, 2008
AMD's 45nm Phenom II Chips Overclocked To 6+GHz
Hold the phone on handing the CPU performance crown to Intel's new Core i7 processors just yet -- the chip giant may yet have a fight on its hands in the coming months.
Advanced Micro Devices demoed its upcoming 45-nanometer "Deneb" desktop chips -- now confirmed as Phenom II -- for reviewers in Austin, Texas, on Thursday, and reports are in that AMD overclockers were able to achieve clock speeds north of 6 GHz on the second-generation quad-core devices.
How far north of 6 GHz? AMD spokesman John Taylor confirmed the basics of stories published by PC Perspective's Josh Walrath and Legit Review's Nathan Kirsch Thursday, but held back on outright endorsing the numbers originally cited in those stories.
Respecting AMD's wishes, we'll just point out that PC Perspective's story now says, "The Phenom II reached WELL over 5.x GHz (read: REALLY over)." And another source gives a more specific number -- 6.3GHz, though again, that could not be confirmed by AMD.
AMD, headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., reached such overclocking heights using liquid nitrogen to cool the processor that was taken to "WELL over 5.x GHz." PC Perspective reports that the Phenom II parts can also hit 4 GHz on air cooling and 5 GHz on dry ice cooling. The top Phenom II chip, due out sometime in the first quarter of 2009, will reportedly list as 3.0 GHz off the shelf.
Intel's top Core i7 processor, which incorporates the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip giant's new Nehalem micro-architecture, is listed as a 3.2 GHz part. Overclockers have reportedly managed to scale it to 4.5 GHz on air cooling alone. Some enthusiasts have also taken Core i7s to 5.7GHz on liquid nitrogen, while the CRN Test Center conducted some "modest overclocking" on the Core i7-965 Extreme Edition to add some extra oomph to an already astonishing Geekbench2 score for that processor on an Intel "SmackOver" board.
AMD's Taylor said the Phenom II demos conducted Thursday were done on what the chip maker is calling its "Dragon" platform -- a quad-core Phenom II processor, ATI Radeon 4800 series discrete graphics and an AMD 790 chipset. Taylor said the processors shown were not hand-picked engineering parts, though he added, "But clearly they weren't duds."
Clock speeds for AMD's upcoming 45nm desktop chips appear to be mapping to the same sort of advantages the recently released 45nm Opterons code-named Shanghai have displayed over the previous generation of 65nm Barcelona server chips. Taylor said the extra level of "headroom" towards dramatic overclocking capacities on the Phenom II parts is due to a combination of architectural improvements over the original Phenoms first released late in 2007.

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