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AMD Spider Platform 9950 Black CPU Review :: 9950+ Features
Launching on July 1st, the Phenom X4 9950 CPU is illustrated here with the other two CPU that AMD added to their lineup, the 9350 and 9150. Also included is current pricing on the various Phenom CPUs available today on Pricewatch including the various Triple cores available:
The review is on the 9950 but a word should be said about the 9350e and the 9150. Both are designed for low power consumption and mainstream performance while having decent prices. The TDP of 65W is a far cry from the TDP of 95W that other Phenom CPUs have previously required and less than half the TDP (Thermal Design Power) that the 9950 requires. The AMD Phenom X4 9950 is based upon AMD’s 65 nanometer SOI (Silicon On Insulator) process. The CPU has approximately 450 million transistors on a die of 285mm squared. The processor is on a Socket AM2+ (940) interface meaning that theoretically the CPU will work on many motherboards that have already reached the market.  AMD Phenom X4 9950 Front  AMD Phenom X4 9950 Back The AMD Phenom 9950+ CPU has a TDP of 140W (Thermal Design Power). This means that the computer is required to dissipate means that the CPU will be limited to motherboards with high tolerances for power. This is the same problem that the 9850 had at launch with its 125W TDP. The 9850+ CPU required a 4-phase power circuitry to operate, meaning that many of the AMD 780G chipset motherboards could not take the new CPU. AMD has a list of recommended motherboards for the 9950+ that includes the nForce 780a SLI and the 790FX chipsets. The 9950+ CPU has four cores. AMD calls their Quad Core CPUs true Quad Core, as each core has its own L1 and L2 cache working together. One of the biggest factors to CPU performance today is the cache. Intel Quad Core CPUs like the QX9770 have up to 12MB of L2 cache. AMD’s 9950+ has 64KB of L1 Data and 64KB of L1 Instruction cache per core. Each core also has 512KB of L2 cache and a shared L3 Cache of 2MB. Total cache amounts include 512KB of L1, 2MB of L2 and 2MB of L3 cache on the 9950. The clock speed on the AMD Phenom X4 9950+ CPU is 2.6GHz, which is a combination of the 13x multiplier multiplied by 200MHz. The 9950 is a unlocked Black Edition CPU meaning that the multiplier can be changed from the current 13x to a higher multiplier or lower multiplier then modifying the HT link. The 9950 has a voltage of 1.312V which is within the necessary 1.25-1.35V variance that AMD has stated for the CPU. The packaging of the 9950 is on the Socket AM2+ interface, meaning that motherboards with support for AM2 CPUs will likely work with this CPU. As noted before, the CPU has a TDP of 140W, so I wouldn’t try it on a board that is below specification. We got a new XFX nForce 750a SLI motherboard to test and I tested the 9950 on this motherboard. The 9950 CPU supports all of the latest CPU extensions from AMD including the MMX+, 3DNow, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4a (for Athlon) and the x86-64 instruction sets. AMD and Intel instruction sets for their CPUs are very alike as the instructions are math instructions. The 9950+ has support for HyperTransport 3.0 which gives a total bandwidth between the CPU and the motherboard chipset of 16GB/second for the I/O. DDR2-1066MHz memory is supported by the 9950, with DDR3 memory support coming later this year. Memory bandwidth for DDR2-1066MHz is 17.056GB/second, meaning that the combination of HT3.0 and DDR2 memory clocked at 1066MHz is 33.1GB/second approximately. Contents:
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