AMD Phenom II X4 955 Spotted

AMD's newest 45 nm Phenom II desktop processor has been spotted at several eTailers. The new AMD Phenom II X4 955 which is slated to be officially released next week has made its way to a few online stores and into the hands of a few craft AMD fanboys.

The new chip, which is AMD's fastest 45 nm quad core processor to date. The X4 955 supports the newest AM3 socket motherboards and DDR3 memory. It features a core clock speed of 3.20 GHz (16.0 x 200 MHz), 512 KB of L2 cache per core, and 6 MB of L3 cache. The chip is said to be very overclocker-friendly thanks to its unlocked bus multiplier, and the "massive headroom" AMD has been brandishing lately.

According to several reports the new chip easily reaches 4ghz (screen shots at Extreme Systems) with good air cooling and the proper components.

TechPowerUp sources based in Hong Kong have been able to get their hands on an early-purchase of the new chip in its retail "processor in a box" (PIB) package (marked with the OPN HDZ955FBGIBOX). Hong Kong pricing put the chip at HKD 2170 or $280 US. The pricing is pretty much inline with some of the early pricing numbers seen on a Google Product search.

At that price point the chip would fall in between the Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 and the Intel Core i7 920.