FiringSquad reviews AMD Phenom 9950 Black Edition and 9350e quad-core processors
It has been nearly eight months since AMD originally launched their line of Phenom CPUs. In that time, they've resolved the infamous TLB erratum that plagued B2 stepping processors, released faster CPUs like the Phenom 9850 Black Edition, and less than three months ago they introduced the world's first triple core processors. All these achievements - along with extremely aggressive pricing - have significantly improved Phenom's position in the market in comparison to Intel's Core 2 Quad, however, AMD still doesn't have a higher-end offering to compete with the middle of Intel's Core 2 lineup, much less the Extreme Edition CPUs at the very top, but as we all know, the bulk of sales occur in the value and midrange segments, and here AMD has a boatload of products ranging from single-core Athlon/Sempron all the way up to today's latest quad-core Phenom CPUs.
For all their accomplishments though, one item has stubbornly remained on AMD's To-Do list: release a 2.6GHz Phenom.
With Phenom originally launching at speeds up to 2.3GHz, you'd think that hitting an additional 300MHz in clock speed wouldn't be much of a challenge for AMD. Obviously they felt the same way to, as their Phenom roadmap at launch called for a 2.6GHz part by the end of Q1'08...
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