AMD Phenom II X4 940

AMD Phenom II X4 940

Ever since the Intel Core processor family has been launched, AMD has been trying hard to keep abreast of the competition.

AMD kept its fingers crossed that the new lineup of Phenom processors would help them grab a larger market share, but the efforts were in vain because of a few glitches in the architecture, and Intel had better performing processors at competitive prices.

This time, AMD is back in action with Phenom II, which is the former Phenom with a couple of tweaks and a leaner design. Now the question is how good Phenom II is and how hard is it going to hit Intel?

Features
Phenom II is built upon the same architecture as that of Phenom, but it’s manufactured using a 45 nm process. Measuring 258 mm2 the die size of Phenom II is 9.5 percent smaller, but yet the transistor count has increased by 68 percent to 758 million.

This increase in the number of transistors has allowed AMD to triple the size of the L3 cache from 2 MB to 6 MB. However, the size of the L1 and L2 cache remains the same. Apart from these, other major improvements are faster L3 cache and more efficient Cool ‘n’ Quiet.While Phenom could only run either at full or half speed, Phenom II can run at four speeds ranging from a minimum of 800 MHz to full speed. In addition to this, AMD has moved away from allowing individual cores to switch independently between different speeds because it caused problems with certain multithreaded applications—runs all its cores at the same frequency, just like the Core i7 except that it cannot completely switch off idle cores.