Computex 2009 Review

AMD: New CPUs

AMD wasn’t just about graphics at this year’s Computex though as the company announced a number of new CPUs, including several mainstream dual-core processors under both the Phenom II and Athlon II brands and its new flagship six-core ‘Istanbul’ Opteron CPU.

The latter, AMD claims, offers “30 per cent more performance per watt” and can be used in 2P, 4P and 8P configurations.

Istanbul includes a new technology called ‘HT Assist’ which aims to reduce probe filter traffic. When processing a piece of data, a CPU in a multi-CPU configuration has to probe the other CPUs to ascertain whether a piece of data held in their caches is more up to date than that held in main memory.

Without HT Assist probes are broadcast to all other CPUs, and the CPU that sent the probe must wait for all CPUs to echo back before it can proceed. In a 4P configuration AMD says this can take around ten actions. With HT Assist enabled, all the CPUs know where to go for the most up to date version of data, and so only two actions are required.


The Phenom II X2 series processors are based on the existing Phenom II die, but with half of the cores disabled – they feature a huge 6MB L3 cache and support both AM2+ and AM3 sockets. The X2 550 is a Black Edition, which means overclocking will be nice and easy too. On the other hand, the Athlon II is the first 45nm Athlon and it’s also the first 45nm AMD processor to not feature an L3 cache. This should mean there’s some decent overclocking headroom, but we’ll be finding out how all these CPUs get on in our full review expected very soon.


Finally, a number of AMD’s partners demoed the first RS880 motherboards. Interestingly, AMD opted not to call this new chipset the 880G and instead chose to brand it ‘785G’ because it represents a small improvement over the existing 780G chipset. The new chipset includes support for DirectX 10.1 and UVD 2.0 amongst other things – the most interesting thing we heard from partners that was AMD has made support for 140W CPUs compulsory, which should hopefully mean we’ll see much more robust power circuits on these boards.