AMD Phenom II Line-Up, Naming Scheme Revealed

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Call me cynical, but I get the distinct impression that AMD's Phenom II naming convention, as reported by Expreview, is aping that of Intel's Core i7 range ever so slightly. Admittedly, as per Intel's Core i7 scheme, the numbers relate to absolutely nothing in the real world and it seems unlikely the similarly named CPUs will even directly compare but, still, it seems just a little odd.

Worse still, the numbering convention doesn't even seem to follow a hard and fast rule. The top end Phenom II X4 chips are all differentiated by the last digit - a '0' for DDR2, AM2+ parts and a '5' for AM3, DDR3 chips. There's also an 8-series of Phenom IIs, though, packing smaller 4MB caches and here the last digit signifies a difference in clock speed, rather than memory controller as both the X4 810 and X4 805 are DDR3 parts. The tri-core 7xx chips at least correlate better, as the second digits equate clock-for-clock with the quad-core 9xx CPUs.

First to be released of these 45nm Phenom re-spins are the Phenom II 940 and Phenom 2 920, with a 3.0GHz and 2.8GHz clock speed respectively and each packing 6MB of cache within a 125W TDP. These processors will be available from the 8th of January and, aside from correlating in randomly-assigned number, will almost certainly be in no way comparable to the Core i7s they have such similar names too.

One can only assume AMD is hoping buyers won't realise that and think the chips do correlate somehow - probably undercutting Intel on price with its similarly named chips in the process.

As they say: all's fair in love and war.

Link:
Expreview.

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