More than a month after it has been officially introduced, AMD's flagship Phenom II X4 processor, the 980 Black Edition, has finally started to make its appearance into the retail market and can now be purchased from various online and offline stores.
Until recently, the only way to get your hands on a Phenom II 980 BE was to place an order with one of the small online shops which were able to bring this chips in limited quantities as a special request.However, this has changed recently as the AMD processors has become available from a number of retailers worldwide, including Newegg, which sells the CPU for $189.99.Introduced on May 15, the Phenom II X4 980 Black Edition processor is based on the Daneb architecture and comes clocked at 3.7GHz, which makes it 100MHz faster than the previous X4 975 BE that arrived in early 2011.Outside of the increased clock speed, the chip doesn't differ too much from AMD's other processors based on the Daneb architecture and it features the same 125W TDP as its lower clocked brothers.The chip also sports 512KB of L2 data cache per core, 6MB of shared Level 3 cache memory, an integrated dual-channel DDR2 and DDR3-1333MHz memory controller and HyperTransport 3.0 support.Since the Phenom II X4 980 comes as a Black Edition part, the processor features an unlocked multiplier, which should enable it to reach higher overclocks.The Phenom II X4 980 will most probably remain the fastest quad-core black edition chip based on the Daneb architecture to be released by AMD, as this will be replaced with the much faster FX-Series processors in August/September of 2011.Together with the X4 980 BE, AMD also introduced four other Athlon II and Phenom II parts, which have also started to make their appearance in the inventories of various retailers.
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