The Fastest Quad-Core AMD Has Ever Released - 980 BE
When Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) first introduced the Phenom II line
of processors, we were still stuck in the days of the AM2+ socket. The
processor that the Phenom II launched with was the AMD Phenom II X4 940
back in 2009. The Phenom II X4 940 is a quad core processor that
cruised along at 3.0GHz and proved to be a very capable processor. Here
we are though, a little more than two years later, looking at the latest
variation of the original Phenom II X4 940, the AMD Phenom II X4 980
Black Edition. It's been over two years since the original AMD Phenom II
X4 processor was released using the 'Deneb' core architecture and,
believe it or not, the core architecture remains exactly the same. The
clock frequency has increased from 3.0GHz to 3.7GHz over the past two
years, though, and that is good news for those that don't overclock. If
you overclock your processor then you are likely going to yawn right
about now as we were able to hit 3.8GHz on the AMD Phenom II X4 940
processor way back in 2008 when we overclocked the first Phenom II X4
that we laid our hands on.
There are a couple of serious differences between the two
processors. We will touch on those differences in a bit, though. Though
I'm betting you're familiar with them already, or at least some of them.
In the last 2+ years AMD has increased the speed of the Phenom II X4 processors 700MHz which is nearly 25%!.
