Introduction

AMD has had a rocky start to its latest architectural update. K10 has had its major downs, suffering right from the start with the TLB bug in the B1 and B2 stepping cores. When they were first introduced to market, they were the plague CPU; as in, every one avoided them like the plague! - It took many months for AMD to write this problem out, but B3 promised a fix and eventually delivered.

But Phenom really didn't deliver what AMD was hoping. In fact, on a clock-for-clock basis it was well behind the 8 ball compared to Intel's Core 2 lineup. While Phenom wasn't able to compete at the enthusiast platform level, AMD has kept things interesting with its prices, trying to undercut Intel at every chance they can and quite rightly so; a 4 core Phenom X4 can be had for next to nothing these days.

While it wasn't the success that AMD really wanted, it wasn't a monumental failure either. Phenom delivers more processing power per core than a similarly clocked K8 processor, which is impressive none the less.

So far we have now seen AMD release the Phenom core in quad, tri and dual core variants, slowly phasing out the K8 architecture for all time. And it's about time, as AMD has been relying on this same architecture since 2003 when Hammer was released at Computex.

Today AMD up's the ante in regards to Phenom with some minor changes to the design. We take a look at the Phenom II 940 processor core along with a new platform named Dragon to complement the latest technology.