AMD Phenom II 45nm Quad-Core CPUs Launched (Updated!)

• bit-tech: AMD's Phenom II X4 940 and 920 CPUs:
  
  

  "The bottom line is that unless Intel drops its price to win favour on the Q9550 and Q9450/Q9400, like it did with the Q6600 when the original Phenom X4s launched, AMD's CPUs will be good value. The Q6600 at £160 will undercut them and still do 3.0-3.6GHz, however the Phenom II X4 at 3.5-3.7GHz will make it faster still and effectively price competitive.
  
  We'd obviously still love to see a cut down £100, or even £150 Phenom II X4 do a large overclock on air: that would be awesome, but for now ~£200-£250 still isn't a huge ask for a competitive CPU that doesn't use a whole lot of power (until overclocked and heavily overvolted). While not the best performer we've ever seen, AMD has finally got a solid competitor it can sell on an inexpensive platform - this should readdress the balance quite nicely in the market."

  
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• Guru3D: AMD Phenom II X4 920 and 940 processor review:
  
  

  "AMD is back on track for sure. Now before we really dig into the conclusion, let's get one thing out of the way first. Make no mistake, AMD is still a step behind Intel. Intel recently introduced Core i7 and we've shown it throughout this review, among that processor series is the Core i7 920 processor, priced close to today's tested Phenom II X4 940. And again; make no mistake, the Intel Core i7 920 processor on average is faster. Especially in most desktop applications, hyper-threading kicks in hard for Core i7. It's however also a much more expensive upgrade.
  
  See, when you place things in perspective, the $278 Phenom II X4 940 is here and there getting in close vicinity of that Core i7 920 processor. But let's compare to the Core 2 series for a moment. One thing we can definitely state is that Phenom II's performance is now comparable to the mid- to more high-end Core 2 Quad performance levels."

  
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• Hardware Canucks: Benchmarkers Guide to the Phenom II:
  
  

  "The fact of the matter is this, in order to upgrade to Phenom II, most AM2+ users will simply need to upgrade the processor. Everyday a list of current compatible motherboards increases, so the rest of your system components can remain untouched. If you are new to overclocking, the Phenom II should be an easy starting point. If you are an experienced overclocker, you'll be running 3.6GHz in a matter of minutes. If you are an extreme benchmarker, the Phenom II brings previously unknown possibilities to the AMD platform with sub-zero cooling. The simple prospect is enough to keep us excited, but we are still prepared to have to dig through piles of processors to get one completely cold bug free..."

  
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• HotHardware: Enter The Dragon: AMD Phenom II X4 940:
  
  

  "The new Phenom II X4 920 and 940 are easily the most powerful desktop processors released from AMD to date. They performed well throughout our entire battery of benchmark tests, besting AMD's previous flagship CPU, the Phenom X4 9950 virtually across the board. Unfortunately, the new Phenom II X4 920 and 940 could quite keep pace with Intel's Penryn-based Core 2 Quads or Nehalem-based Core i7s. The Phenom II X4 managed to pull ahead of the Q9400, Q9650, and i7 920 on a few instances, but overall Intel's platform was still faster. The gap has closed quite a bit, however."

  
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• The Tech Report: AMD's Phenom II processors: The underdog aims for a comeback:
  
  

  "In the Phenom II, AMD has produced a chip that comes strikingly close to duplicating the performance of Intel's mid-range Core 2 Quad processors, the Q9300 and Q9400. The Phenom II proved to be faster in several of our gaming tests, but it was slower in some components of WorldBench, including WinZip and Photoshop, which lowered its overall score a bit. On the whole, though, the key characteristic we saw through the bulk of our performance tests was the remarkable parity between the Phenom II X4 940 and the Core 2 Quad Q9400—and the same between their siblings one notch down the ladder. The idle power use of our Phenom II X4 940 system was a couple of watts lower than its Core 2 Quad-based adversary, although it did draw 24W more under load, which was the Phenom II's one definitive disadvantage in this comparison. The Phenom II may even be able to rival the Core 2 Quad's vaunted overclocking headroom—and it's hard to argue with the ease of overclocking a Black Edition processor with a simple multiplier tweak."

  
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• TweakTown: AMD Phenom II Arrives 45nm Deneb and Dragon Platform:
  
  

  "With a name like Phenom II we were kind of hoping to see something major in change from what AMD calls its improvements to the K10 architecture. Now, we aren’t scoffing at the increase in L3 cache from 2MB to 6MB, or the new fabrication process, but AMD really hasn’t done any major upgrades to the Phenom to classify it as a new processor. Phenom II is simply what we would call moving from Conroe to Penryn; a new fab and a few tweaks, but no new architecture.
  
  Now, we have a few gripes on the CPU, but we’ll first touch on the pluses. The reduction in fabrication size from 65nm to 45nm has resulted in AMD cutting power requirements for the latest batch of Phenom II processors; this makes them ideal for media servers and mid range gaming platforms."

  
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