Ignore the Timing, AMD's News is Huge

Advanced Micro Devices picked today - - sandwiched in between Apple's and Microsoft's earnings - - to make one of its most important product announcements in years.

As the Test Center's Brian Sheinberg reports in his review, AMD is delivering to market CPUs, 3.0GHz X4 945 and the 3.2GHz Black Edition X4 955, that could spark a new round of competition in desktop pricing in ways we haven't seen in a while.

The Black Edition X4 955 is priced at $245, a fraction of the price of PC processors in the same ballpark from Intel. While Intel has been simply dominant for the past two years in both engineering and execution, and its latest Nehalem processors for servers are the most powerful we've ever seen, AMD's latest Black Edition CPU has all the earmarks of a game-changer for system builders and their customers. The AMD pricing scheme on the new chips will invite many into the world of screamingly high performance that otherwise would have had to wait a year or two until Intel pricing dropped.

Here's how AMD does it, according to Sheinberg's review:

With another acronym, BEMP (Black Edition Memory Profiles), AMD has worked with memory manufacturers to create a database of specifications for certain high-frequency DDR3 modules. When using a motherboard with a BIOS that supports it, OverDrive 3.0 can use BEMP to look up frequency and latency settings and automatically set the parameters within the BIOS.

Just by using BEMP, our Geekbench2 score jumped to 6,114 but, this being a Black Edition, we decided to push the CPU a little and do some overclocking. Using only stock heat sink and fan cooling, reviewers slowly increased the processor's multiplier and voltage levels, finally reaching a surprising overall speed of 4.0GHz -- almost a full GHz above its out-of-the-box frequency. At this speed, our system's Geekbench2 score was 7,434.

Getting the most out of a PC's hardware profile will be key to getting the most out of Windows Vista, Windows 7 when it ships, or even Linux for that matter.

Headlines today may be spread out among other stories, but keep an eye on AMD and its latest PC processors and technology during the coming weeks and months. Keep an eye on Intel, too, and how they may respond.

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