HEXUS' very own Mr Sandhu was watching AMD's representatives run a cherry-picked 45nm Phenom II CPU at near-4GHz with basic air-cooling at a tech day in Texas last week.
It takes some doing to send Sandhu away impressed, but he concluded that "should AMD be able to productise the all-new Phenom mkII at, say, 3GHz+ at launch, with promise of higher frequencies and DDR3 support to come, along with a street price of around £200, then Intel may not have it all its own way".
Today, a pair of those Phenom II processors have appeared on the pages of UK-based etailer MoreComputers.com. According to its product listings, Phenom II will arrive in two models - a 2.8GHz Phenom II 920 and a 3.0GHz Phenom II 940 Black Edition, priced at £190.65 and £231.32, respectively.
The 920 and 940 nomenclature may seem strangely familiar, but the quad-core Phenom II won't be challenging Intel's Core i7 in the performance stakes, we feel. Instead, it'll attempt to put AMD back in the desktop race with a set of affordable mid-range chips that should at the very least challenge Intel's ageing Core 2 range.
There may still be no win in sight for AMD, though. Should Phenom II pose a threat, we'd expect Intel to respond with a slight swipe at its Core 2 pricing. Either way, the competition should result in well-priced mid-range processors for the masses.
Readers should also be aware that MoreComputers' prices are anything but definitive, and that the etailer doesn't offer any pre-sales or post-sales technical support whatsoever. Although the listings appear to be about right in our estimation, official pricing and availability won't be known until AMD lets it slip.
