AMD presents Phenom II TWKR processor

Reports on the cominc of a special AMD Phenom II processor were already made a few weeks ago. The 'TWKR' edition of the quadcore Phenom will be a limited edition specially selected by AMD to feature maximum overclocking capability. This places TWKR one step beyond AMD's Black Edition processors, which usually fare quite well when it comes to overclocking the 45nm chips.

The TWKR edition will not be sold in the retail channels and will be available through AMD's promotion channel. The bundle will not feature any warranty, something that doesn't surprise us given the nature of the chip. The processor is based on the 45nm 'Deneb' core and features 6 MB of shared L3 cache spread on its four active cores. The revision and stepping are identical to AMD's regular Phenom II Black Edition processor, making the TWKR version nothing more than a hand-picked quadcore from AMD's topsegment.

The Phenom II TWKR has the suffix '42' in its name, which indicates the presence of 4 cores and a standard clock frequency of 2 GHz. This frequency is reached through a 200 MHz HTT frequency with a multiplier of 10x. It's no surprise that these values aren't locked. The processor uses an increased voltage of 1,44 Vcore out of the box and the chips are specially selected to be able to reach greater voltages. With the standard voltage and decent aircooling, an overclock of 4 GHz should already be attainable. It is quite obvious that aircooling will not make the TWKR processor show its full potential, as that would require either liquid nitrogen or liquid helium.

The Phenom II TWKR features special packaging

AMD already gives a short impression of the new TWKR processor on Youtube. Overclockers as K|ngp|n, Gomeler and *chew have already toyed with the chip to find out what it was capable of. The highest clock frequency they reached that could be validated was 6,89 GHz. As of yet, there are less than 100 of these TWKR editions, with the potential varying between each chip. Image source: Legit Reviews.

The AMD Phenom II TWKR won't be found at the local PC store

Tags: deneb overclocking phenom

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