Tuesday, December 16, 2008

AMD Phenom II Offers 20 Percent Performance Gains

The new chip sports frequency, cache and core uplift

This year is almost over, and 2009 will bring to the table the latest innovations from Advanced Micro Devices in the form of the next-generation Phenom II processors. In only about three weeks from now, we'll be able to actually get our hands on the highest performing micro-processor AMD has ever created.

The upcoming code-named Deneb parts have been talked about a lot lately as the performance gains they are expected to deliver rise high above the previous series Phenom chips. According to the latest performance charts on the web, the new Phenom II CPUs should bring about 20 percent performance improvements compared to its predecessors.

As the Sunnyvale chip maker states, the Phenom II chips sport 3 percent core uplift, which combines with a 5 percent cache uplift. If we're to add here the 12 percent frequency uplift the company says the processors are expected to bring, we sum up 20 percent performance uplift for the next-generation AMD Phenom II CPU.

The charts that surfaced on news site vr-zone show how the new chips gain more performance compared to the old series. For starters, the chip can handle more instructions per core, to which the increased frequency to 3.0GHz is added. Besides, the cache has been increased by 4 more MB, and support for DDR3 memory has been included.

Overall, the performance gains of the new chips may not sound too exciting, yet we should not forget the fact that recent tests have proved the processors to be great overclockers. The Phenom II CPU has been reported to be able to overclock easily over 4GHz while still cooled on air, but its OC abilities do not end here. Other reports have showed it going all the way to 6.3GHz, more than double its factory clock speed, as also showed in this webcast.