jmke

Fortunately, although the change is no small accomplishment for AMD, it is relatively simple in the grand scheme of things. The Phenom II's memory controller has been modified to add support for DDR3 memory, mainly. Another happy consequence of the new silicon revision is additional clock speed headroom for the "uncore" (as Intel might call it) portions of the Phenom II—the memory controller, L3 cache, and HyperTransport—whose clocks run at 2GHz in this wave of new Socket AM3 processors.

Beyond that, little has changed in a month. The chips are still manufactured using AMD's 45nm SOI fab process, and AMD hasn't even modified its die size or transistor count estimates: they're still 258 mm² and 758 million, just like previous Phenom IIs. The new chips are still compatible with existing 7-series chipsets from AMD, as well.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/16382

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