AMD Upgrades 'Dragon' With New Phenom II BE

AMD has added a second "Black Edition" microprocessor to its Phenom II X4 lineup, pairing it with three new utilities to improve the overall system performance.

The 3.2-GHz Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition is 200 MHz faster than the existing Phenom II X4 945 Black Edition. The 955 is priced at $245, which AMD executives claimed gave them price/performance leadership in the enthusiast category. The addition of the 955 represents a slight shift in strategy for AMD; usually, the chip maker has only offered one Black Edition processor at a time. Both the 955 and the 945 are identical, save for the difference in speed. However, the market still has pent-up demand for the older 945, and AMD intends to keep the slightly older processor as long as customers keep asking for it, said Brent Barry, a desktop gaming strategist for AMD.

AMD claims that the 955 is, on average, about 30 to 48 percent faster than last year's "Spider" platform, and that the refreshed Dragon platform with the 955 is about 10 to 15 percent faster than the older 945-based Dragon platform. The bulk of the gains have come from the 4890 graphics enhancement, Barry said.

AMD also launched enhancements to both its OverDrive and Cool'N'Quiet technologies, offering fine-tuned performance enhancements for overclocking, and improved power management, respectively. Barry said the new 955 eliminates many of the "freezing bugs" that can cause a chip cooled to under 80 degrees Celsius to basically shut down.

The OverDrive 3.0 software utility features include AMD Black Edition memory profiles, with pre-tuned memory profiles for the Black Edition and DDR-2 and DDR-3 memory; AMD Smart Profiles, with custom performance tuning on an application-by-application basis, and customized autoclock and fan control enhancements. The utility has also been tuned to work with Windows 7.

"We're trying to help develop more of the overall platform experience," Barry said. As the only silicon manufacturer with a high-performance graphics and CPU line, "there are all the different pieces of the platform stuff that we can do and other people can't…software is an easy, quick way to do that," he said.

AMD's Cool'N'Quiet was the first effort by a manufacturer to optimize a PC's microprocessor for low power, and the company's third update to the technology builds on that premise. An enhanced CoolCore version shares the same technology as is found in AMD's new Opteron EE chips, introduced Wednesday; parts of the cache can be turned off when not in use. SmartFetch writes data stored in the level-1 and -2 caches to the shared level-3 cache when a core shuts off, allowing the other cores to access the data without waking up the original core. Finally, an advanced version of AMD's PowerNow! Technology can double the number of available power states, allowing finer granularity in the tradeoff between lowering power consumption and increasing performance.

AMD's ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card, part of the Dragon platform, also has a similar capability, throttling its power in response to low activity.