1 - A Black Edition Introduction

The Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition

Last years introduction of the Phenom 9500, 9600 and 9700 were, as you guys know, not meticulously successful. AMD released an, in theory, great architecture. It arrived really late on the market, yet more importantly it had a vicious bug which we now all know as the TBL erratum. These two facts really damaged any marketing spin that AMD could give a perfectly interesting micro-architecture, as by patching out that bug, they where loosing performance greatly, yet was needed for stability. That however was the B2 core revision of the processor.

It's now April 2008 and AMD released their Phenom X4 50-series processors, with an all new fixed B3 core, hopefully they can now leave the past behind them and move forward with a processor that can actually start competing with the competition.

So get that in your brain real tight:  The biggest deficit of that B2 revision processor, the deletion of the TLB erratums, is now fixed in the B3 edition.

Today we'll look at the new B3 revision processor and continue where we left of with our newest Phenom review.

To do that we need to chat a little about the architecture underneath that heat spreader. The Phenom is based on what is called the 'Barcelona' architecture. The silicon has four native independent cores merged together into one die; opposed to Intel who merges two dual-core chips together in one die. AMD claims due to the independent cores the technology can be be faster than Intel's solution in multi-threaded applications, their technology should be more efficient.

Let's have a quick architectural overview, and then dive into what it's all about .. performance benchmarks.