AMD'S FASTEST EVER CPU

.....AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition....

AMD has made its fastest ever CPU. Clocked at 3.4GHz, it finally surpasses the highest mark reached by its dual core sibling the Athlon 64 X2, which was released back in 2007 and ran at 3.2GHz (the recent 955 BE did equal this but not surpass it).

The Phenom II X4 965 BE is a quad core CPU built on the same architecture and manufacturing process as AMD's previous top dog, the 955 BE. The Phenom II X4 965 BE is cheaper than Intel's entry level quads, the Core i5 750 and Core i5 760. However, at 3.4GHz the 965 is clocked much higher than the Intel opposition.

The Phenom II X4 965 is an AM3 processor, which sports a 938 micro-pin grid array (micro-PGA) configuration. This processor, as with all of the Phenom II X4 line, is manufactured using a 45nm process and has 758 million transistors. One difference between this and the Phenom II X4 955 is that the X4 965 has maximum TDP of 140 watts, using a voltage of 0.875 - 1.5v with a maximum operating temperature of 62C degrees. The Phenom II X4 965 does support HyperTransport 3.0 for up to 37.3GB/s when paired with DDR3 1333MHz memory, and 33.1GB/s when paired with DDR2 1066MHz memory. The cache breakdown for L2 is 2MB, which translates to 512KB per core, and the L3 is 6MB shared between each of the cores. The Phenom II X4 965 is clocked at 3.4GHz (200MHz x 17), and is a "Black Edition" processor - meaning that the multiplier is unlocked, so higher overclocks can be attained with the right tweaking.
This processor runs at a slightly lower voltage than the previous model. The 140W 965 has a default core voltage of 1.4v, whereas the new 125W 965 runs at 1.375v. In theory these chips should provide slightly better overclocking (on average).