AMD announces seven new Phenom CPUs

Posted at: 4:00am 27th March 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Four quad-core X4 chips, two triple-core X3 chips and one brand new low-power chip

With its late arrival and underwhelming performance, it didn't look like it could get much worse for AMD's original Phenom CPUs when they launched. Then, to make matters worse, it became apparent that the Phenom 9700 had problems with its translation lookup buffer (TLB), and the chip never made it to release. AMD reckons it's solved the issues now, though, and has announced not one, but seven new Phenom CPUs today.

At the top of the pile are the new Phenom X4 chips that pick up where the Phenom 9700 should have left off. The Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition is clocked at 2.5GHz, while the 9750 is clocked at 2.4GHz. AMD claims that both chips are faster than a Core 2 Quad Q6600 in its own tests. As such, it looks as though AMD is still positioning the top-end Phenom chips to compete with Intel's low-end quad-core chip, rather than the Extreme CPUs.

AMD told Custom PC that there were no major changes in architecture between the new chips and the problematic 9700. In addition to the two top-end chips, AMD has also announced the 2.3GHz 9650 and 2.2GHz 9550 at the lower end of the scale.

Meanwhile, even further down the scale, AMD has also officially announced the release of its first triple-core Phenom X3 chips - the 2.3GHz 8600 and the 2.1GHz 8400, which are now shipping to system builders, such as Mesh who announced its first Phenom X3 machines back in February. However, AMD is also planning to introduce newer chips for retail in the form of the 2.3GHz X3 8650 and 2.1GHz 8450 in mid-to-late April.

Finally, and perhaps more interestingly, AMD is also introducing a brand new energy-efficient quad-core processor called the Phenom 9100e, which AMD claims is the only quad-core CPU with a TDP of 65W. AMD said the chip would be ideal for anyone wanting to build, small and quiet systems for the bedroom, as well as PC manufacturers who want to build 'sleeker' systems. The 1.8GHz chip is unlikely to be fast, but it will offer a quad-core CPU with minimal thermal requirements, which could be good for those in the modding community too.

AMD also said that this was 'the first in a long line of energy-efficient processors that you'll see from AMD,' and that we'll see more 'e' processors later in the year. Given the disappointing performance of the Phenom 9600 when compared to comparatively priced Intel CPUs, it looks as though AMD could be shifting its future strategy towards energy-efficient processors at lower clock speeds.

All the other new Phenom chips have a TDP rating of 95W, and all the chips feature the usual Phenom cache architecture, with 512KB of Level 2 cache per core and a further 2MB of shared Level 3 cache. AMD estimated the pricing of the new chips at £115 for the Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition, £105 for the 9750 and £95 for the 9550, although no details about the X3 retail prices have been revealed yet.