Introduction

AMD has had a rocky start to its latest architectural update. K10 has had its major downs, suffering he TLB bug in the B1 and B2 stepping cores. When they were first introduced to market, they were the plague CPU; as in, every one avoided them like the plague! - It took many months for AMD to write this problem out, but B3 promised a fix and eventually delivered.

While fixing the problem, they couldn't fix the slow clock speeds that the Phenom suffers on the 65nm process. And with 45nm still some time away for AMD, the clock speed wall of 2.8GHz is limiting AMD from getting any real performance from K10.

To that end, AMD has moved more of their focus toward power savings, giving users a better overall PC with lower power requirements. Phenom X4 managed to give quite a good amount of performance for the price, and its power usage is extremely impressive.

Today on hand, we have the newest member of the X4 family; the 9350e. This CPU is a quad core offering with 2GHz core clock. It's designed for a power efficient quad core system. Let's take a look and see how it compares to the X3 and the Athlon 4850e.