With respect to hardware, nothing really seems to have changed, there are no changes in chache size, the '955 features the full size 6 MB L3 cache, nor has the transistor count changed. Rated frequency is up a bit, from 3.0 GHz in the X4 940 to 3.2 GHz in the 955 and, of course, the socket pinout is AM3, meaning a 938 pin-count and native DDR3 support with backward compatibility with any AM2/AM2+ board as long as the BIOS supports the new CPU. At the same time, AMD is launching the Phenom II X4 945, which essentially replaces the X4 940 in Socket AM3 flavor and runs natively at 3.0 GHz. In so far, there is really nothing new but some tweaks must have been applied because new BIOS revisions are required to operate the new CPU offerings. Moreover, we observed a few anomalies in benchmarking behavior that further support our suspicions that more fine-tuning went on under the hood than what AMD publicly discloses.
Phenom II X4 945
Before going into benchmarks - arguably what a lot of this article is all about - there are a few improvements in AMD's Overdrive (AOD) version 3, a beta version of which we had, introducing an amalgamate of EPP and XMP and Turbo Boost in a single software interface. And guess what, it is actually done in a pretty smart fashion (no surprise there since your's truly had a finger in some of the feature definitions).
Phenom II X4 945
Before going into benchmarks - arguably what a lot of this article is all about - there are a few improvements in AMD's Overdrive (AOD) version 3, a beta version of which we had, introducing an amalgamate of EPP and XMP and Turbo Boost in a single software interface. And guess what, it is actually done in a pretty smart fashion (no surprise there since your's truly had a finger in some of the feature definitions).
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