FiringSquad reviews AMD Phenom 9600 Black Edition processor
When AMD "launched" its quad-core Phenom toward the end of last year, our very own Brandon Bell was there to weigh in. And if you've read that story, you already know he was not at all impressed with AMD's market readiness. From a lack of hardware samples to a hardly-compelling scaling story, Phenom was not looking like the all-star we were expecting. At the time, Brandon concluded that Intel had the upper hand and would likely continue flexing its muscle to stay a step of AMD.
That was four months ago. Since then, AMD has slowly ramped up production on the Phenom. And while the company has yet to unveil a new model of its quad-core darling, it did recently let loose a "Black Edition" of the flagship Phenom 9600 running at 2.3 GHz with an unlocked clock multiplier. The word over at AMD is that we'll see new speed bins of the Phenom soon, along with a fresh spin of the silicon that fixes the errata number 298 - the TLB issue said to plague all of AMD's quad-core chips...
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