Friday, August 28th 2009

Some Athlon II X4 Chips Mutate to Phenom II X4

by
btarunr
 Discuss (30 Comments)
The latest in AMD's almost deliberate series of processors that unlock into powerful / more capable processors is the Athlon II X4. Some of the earliest batches of these sub-$150 quad-core processors can be converted to more powerful Phenom II X4 chips using a simple trick. When unlocked, the chip will be equipped with 6 MB L3 cache. Supposed to have been based on the "Propus" core that physically lack a L3 cache, apparently early batches continue to use the "Deneb" core with L3 cache locked (using moist threads instead of a padlock). Currently there's no information as to which specific batches of Athlon II X4 620 and Athlon II X4 630 work. The trick works on some motherboards that support the Advanced Clock Calibration (ACC) feature. Simply set the ACC option in the BIOS setup to "Auto" from its default value of "Disabled", and you're done.
Source: Silicon Madness

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30 Comments on Some Athlon II X4 Chips Mutate to Phenom II X4

#26
Neo4
Frankly, I'm a little bit ticked off. I don't want Athlon II X4 to be based on the Deneb core. The X2 550 BE can take care of the enthusiast's out there that hope to get a Deneb quad core. I want the Athlon II X4 to be a 4 thread simultaneously capable processor, L3 cache less CPU that runs on less juice and overclocks like a teenager spanks his monkey. I just want to upgrade my email, browser, bit torrent etc. box to have better multitasking prowess without jacking up my energy usage. I want to say goodbye to my Athlon 64 5400+ BE to get better performance with less energy usage! Whew! Sorry about that! :D
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#27
eidairaman1
The Exiled Airman
aj28It's not about unstable computing, it's about 100%-stable computing versus 99.99%-stable computing. There's not one processor being sold on the market which qualifies as the latter. Why do you think such a big deal was made of the TLB bug? Fact of the matter is, while it was experienced in the wild by very, very few users, it was still a defect, and that's something that's flat-out cannot tolerated in the CPU market, even if chances are that you'll never encounter it.

(By the way, try to see this as an OEM, not an end-user!)

Based on that ideology, I think that the majority of users unlocking these cores aren't practicing any sort of it's-okay-that-it-crashes-every-day-or-two computing, they're simply saying that they're okay with a known defect which, as time will tell, they'll probably never see.
The TLB is i believe what prevented the Phenoms from Clocking high, same with Brisbane.
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#28
Neo4
eidairaman1The TLB is i believe what prevented the Phenoms from Clocking high, same with Brisbane.
Not the TLB bro, it was the 65 nm process that killed the original Phenom. The first native quad core CPU is bound to have glitches but it wasn't meant to be until 45 nm. Intel with its huge resources is months ahead of AMD in the performance arena. Just wait for a couple years when Bulldozer completely starts a new architecture at 32/22 nm. Then we'll see a new AMD CPU that will give Inhell a run for it's money. :slap:
Posted on Reply
#29
subhendu
nice to see a 150$ quad core
waiting for more reviews...
any idea about release date?
Posted on Reply
#30
Neo4
subhendunice to see a 150$ quad core
waiting for more reviews...
any idea about release date?
Sure hope it costs less than $150 and the 4th quarter is what I've been reading. Athough there will be DX11 40 nm cards in September.
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