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AMD Phenom II unveiled
New 45nm Phenom II chips will be clocked at up to 3GHz, with a TDP of 125W and DDR3 memory support
After cycling through various Athlon monikers, not to mention the Phenom brand, AMD has now announced that it’s going back to the age-old sequel-naming tradition with its 45nm quad-core Phenom ‘Deneb’ chips, which will be called Phenom II X4.
AMD hasn’t made a big deal about the name, and we only came across it after spotting a single mention of it in AMD’s official release about the new 45nm Shanghai chips. The release mentions a new ‘Dragon’ platform, which we assume is going to be the equivalent of the ‘Spider’ platform when Phenom was first released. According to AMD, Dragon ‘is designed to harness the power of fusion by optimising the performance of new 45nm AMD Phenom II X4 quad-core processors with award-winning AMD 700 Series chipsets and award-winning ATI Radeon HD 4000 series graphics.’
AMD says that Dragon is currently on schedule for the first quarter of 2009, and that it will feature ‘all next-generation components in comparison to the first generation AMD “Spider” platform released in 2008.’ We don’t have all the details on Deneb yet, but we know that it will be based on the same 45nm technology as Shanghai, using immersion lithography. AMD claims that its new Shanghai Opteron chips deliver ‘up to 35 percent more performance with up to a 35 percent decrease in power consumption at idle,’ so we’re looking forward to seeing what Phenom II has to offer.
MSI has also just announced that it will be supporting the new 45nm CPUs on 20 of its AM2+ motherboards via a BIOS update, saying that ‘the upgradeable BIOS allow the previous Socket AM2+ mainboard to support the AM3 and AM2+ 45nm processors,’ which is great news in terms of socket compatibility. According to MSI, the AM3 CPUs will also add DDR3 memory support to the integrated memory controller. The company also says that the move to 45nm chips will allow AMD to clock a Phenom CPU to 3GHz, while the TDP drops from 140W to 125W. The full list of MSI’s supporting motherboards can be found here.
NOTE: The logo opposite isn’t an official AMD logo, but one we knocked up in Photoshop ourselves
