bit-tech Editorial: A Phenomenon in Warsaw

"At the eleventh hour of the Phenom production, AMD found an issue in the L3 cache transition lookup buffer at very heavy loads which prevented the company from launching it at 2.4GHz. When AMD announced this to the members of press present at the event, there was that horrible silence where opinion in the room just sank.

The company did state that there is a BIOS fix available which users would be able to turn on or off in AMD Overdrive – the company’s new tweaking utility, which actually looks pretty swanky – as the situations when end users are likely to encounter this problem are very small in number. The penalty for enabling the L3 cache TLB fix all the time is around a 10 percent performance decrease, which I guess is why AMD is leaving users with the option to enable or disable the fix as they see fit. The company’s representatives said that the issue would be fixed soon with a new stepping, which will probably be what the higher-clocked chips will use when they’re launched early next year.