Until now; AMD’s farcical Phenom chip has been far outshone by pretty much anything and everything produced by Intel; The first Phenoms consumed power like a fish takes in water, as well as being affected by a Translation Lookaside Buffer bug. Although I’m an AMD advocate; the Phenom story so far has been a bit of a joke.

This is AMD’s third attempt at the Phenom; and it looks like third time lucky, as the new Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition looks like something at least half-decent: It’s had a large revamp in the architectural department; notably as regards the 45nm transistors and an extra 4 MB of level 3 cache; bringing the total up to 6MB.

Using smaller transistors has greatly reduced the heat output of the new chips; with the result that they can work at a higher frequency than their predecessors. Now running at stock speeds of 3GHz, the new processors still use less power.

Another bonus is that the Phenom II is pin-compatible with the original Phenom, works with DDR2 RAM, and will directly replace its ancestor in a socket AM2+ motherboard capable of running a 125W CPU. – A BIOS update may well be required nevertheless.

This may be where the Phenom has the edge over Intel’s offerings. Upgrading to the Intel Core i7 CPU range entails buying and fitting not just a new processor; but also a new motherboard, cooler, and new, more expensive DDR3 memory too.

AMD are  launching the 3GHz 940 Black Edition along with the 2.8GHz Phenom II X4 920.

Maybe AMD are at last catching up with Intel? What’s your take on it?