Phenom X4 9900 Review

As far as products out now AMD have only released two Phenom processors as of now, the Phenom 9500 and the Phenom 9600. The sample we have is an engineering sample of the Phenom 9900 which is clocked at 2.6GHz. The Phenom 9600 is 2.3GHz and the Phenom 9500 is 2.2GHz. These however are also to be replaced though sometime in the first quarter of next year as an errata was found in these processors where the hardware can sometimes crash when all four cores are at maximum load. TechReport has an excellent article on this which investigates the problem and looks at the fix as well as the performance penalty of the fix. For the record we never encountered this problem and we maxed out all four cores in multiple benchmarks and we have yet to hear of this from others but still it is another thorn in the launch which hopefully AMD will remedy ASAP.