AMD unveils super quad-core CPU

The 45nm CPU clocks at a stock frequency of 3.4GHz, but AMD reckons there is plenty of headroom to take this even higher. The chip is designed to work best as part of the company's Dragon platform technology, aimed at high-end users who need a lot of desktop processing power.

AMD is pitting this chip head to head with the new Core i7 Nehalem processors from rival Intel.

Each of the Phenom II X4 965's four cores includes 512KB of L2 cache and that is encased in another 6MB of L3 cache. Furthermore, the chip will work with both the AM3 and AM2+ socket motherboard and is compatible with both DDR2 and DDR3 system memory.

Despite the high performance, AMD claims the 965 will not be a power hog thanks to its support for Cool'n'Quiet 3.0 power thermal management technology, and features that allow inactive portions of the processor to be clocked down when not needed.

The AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition is expected to sell for around US$245.