AMD and Intel are fighting for control of the computing dollar from consumers and businesses and have been for years. In the PC space, Intel rules the roost in terms of pure performance with their Core i7 CPUs being faster than the equivalent AMD CPUs in virtually every sense. AMD, however, is not trying to compete directly with the Core i7 CPUs but with the lower priced Core 2 Quad and Core 2 Duo CPUs and they have been succeeding with CPUs that are faster for the same price as equivalent Intel CPUs.

AMD launched their AM3 CPUs earlier this year with processors ranging in speed and performance from the Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition being reviewed here to the Athlon II X2 CPU that marks the low-end of the spectrum. The nice thing about the AM3 is that it is backwards compatible with Socket AM2+ motherboards, just losing DDR3 support when migrating to the new CPU Socket on an older motherboard. Today’s review is on the fastest of the AM3 CPUs, the AMD Phenom II X 4 955 Black Editions.

The Phenom II is AMD’s first architecture built on the 45nm Silicon on Insulator process at their manufacturing plant in Dresden Germany. Each Phenom II CPU is 258mm2 in size and has 758 million transistors. The CPU has 128KB of L1 cache (64KB Data+64KB Instruction) per core, 512KB L2 cache per core and a 6MB L3 cache shared by all cores.

AMD has traditionally allowed older motherboards to be upgraded with new CPUs since the advent of the Socket AM2 platform. The AM3 CPU has 938 pins which is 2 less than the AM2+. The pin configuration is identical minus the two pins, meaning you can fit an AM3 CPU on an AM2+ motherboard. The reverse is not true as the AM2+ CPU would have two extra pins that would not fit on an AM3 interface.

In terms of multimedia instructions the Phenom II CPU has support for MMX+, 3Dnow1 (+), SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4A and x86-64 instructions. The Phenom II is a true 4 core CPU in other words all four cores are on the same die. As you might recall, the Intel Core 2 Quad CPUs had two Core 2 Duo CPUs on one die. The 955 Black Edition CPU is clocked at 3.2GHz which is the fastest available Phenom II CPU on the market today.

The HyperTransport bus is the replacement for the FSB on AMD CPUs and chipsets. The AMD Phenom II 955 Black Edition supports HyperTransport 3.0. The CPU has a HT bus speed of 2000MHz, giving a bandwidth between the CPU and the chipset of 14.4GB/second. The memory controller on the Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition supports dual channel DDR3-1333MHz which provides a maximum of 21.328GB/second. This means that the total bandwidth available is 35.728GB/second.