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Faster, bug-free Phenoms arrive
Four new TLB bug-free Phenoms go on sale later this week, the 2.2GHz Phenom 9550, the 2.3GHz Phenom 9650, the 2.4GHz Phenom 9750 and a new king of the hill: the 2.5GHz Phenom 9850. The latter has an unlocked multiplier so enthusiasts can overclock it to 2.8 or 2.9GHz, speculates Jon Carvill, AMD’s European PR manager.
A faster 2.6GHz Phenom will appear in the coming months, while the original Phenoms (9500 and 9600) will slowly be phased out.
AMD promises to shake up the low-end quad core arena by releasing an energy efficient version of the Phenom, called the Phenom 9100e. 9100es are cherry picked from AMD's manufacturing line for their excellent thermal properties. They run at 1.8GHz and have a thermal design point of 65W, significantly lower than the Phenom 9700's 125W TDP (Phenom 9700 review here) and the 9600's 95W TDP.
The triple-core Phenom 8000 series, which are quad core Phenoms with a one dud core, have gone to PC manufacturers already and will be appearing in shops in retail boxes in two week's time.
Ian McNaughton, a senior product manager at AMD, told me yesterday that the TLB (translation lookaside buffer) bug residing in the original Phenoms (9500, 9600, 9700), was blown out of all proportion.
There are long lists of bugs associated with x86 architecture and this was just another one, he said. AMD talked about the bug openly at Phenom's launch so its credibility with server manufacturers wouldn’t be ruined.
Servers can be seriously affected by this bug, but I’ve use a Phenom system on a daily basis and I can’t make the system crash in a repeatable fashion. In fact, PCW’s Phenom system has only crashed once, in Unreal Tournament 3, which is very unlikely to be related to the bug. All other benchmarks, games and applications run fine on a daily basis.
Finally, despite announcing Phenom X2s a few months ago, McNaughton admitted that Phenom based architecture won’t make it into dual core format in the foreseeable future. McNaughton claimed the X2 was on powerpoint slides to put AMD’s competitors on the wrong foot... so, Athlon X2s may well remain the fastest dual core AMD chips for a while.
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