After fixing their B1 and B2 revision Phenom processors with a B3 release, the new processors appear to benchmark well, beating out the B2 revision with the BIOS “fix” turned off. The new BIOS fix works around the L3 cache bug allowing for the improved performance.
Don’t get too excited–the B3 release chip isn’t readily available just yet, but should be shipping, “later this quarter…” according to Anandtech.
I will take that to mean sometime in the next few weeks as we are close to the end of this quarter. Anandtech notes that the sample chip they had ran at 2.2GHz and they could get it up to 2.6GHz with some effort. Even then, it could use some more clock to challenge Intel, who is already there but not in enough quantity to feed the market. I am starting to think that this year in the 2nd half there is room for AMD to win back some share. We shall see…
