AMD Hops On The Consumer 45NM Bandwagon With Phenom II

If you found yourself wondering what the boys from Advanced Micro Devices (better known as AMD) were doing last year when Intel launched their 45nm desktop PC chip, the Intel Core i7, then wonder no more because earlier today that very question was answered.

Called the Phenom II, the new chip is a quad-core family of desktop processors running up to 3 GHz with up to 8 Mbytes of on-board cache. The Phenom II uses the new architecture of having on-board memory controllers and high-speed processor interconnects which reportedly give the chips up to 20 percent improvements in performance over the original 65nm Phenom CPUs which ran at up to 2.6 GHz. The boost comes from faster data rates, doubling of total cache, improvements in instructions per clock and use of DDR3.

In an excerpt from EETimes.com, Simon Solotko, senior brand manager in AMD's desktop division was quoted as saying,

"This will be a great spoiler product, well positioned against Core i7. There's no good reason to spend hundreds of dollars more on a platform"

AMD is reportedly pricing the 3.0 GHz Phenom II for $275 as compared to the competing Intel Core i7 3.2 GHz costing $999.