AMD Prepares Phenom II Business CPU

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AMD is planning to add another new chip to their “business class” line of processors. The Phenom II X4 97 will join the B93 and B95 as chips that AMD markets towards enterprise customers. According to source Fudzilla, they haven’t been successful, but perhaps the new and improved 97 chip can change some minds.

This is something that only AMD has really attempted. Sure, Intel has produced the overpowered, expensive Xeon processors that are rarely used outside of enterprise workstations, but they’ve never marketed those as business-only chips. Further more, AMD even mentions that these new business class chips will be “more reliable”, which makes one question what that says about the rest of their chips.

The Phenom II X4 97 drops the “B” prefix of the earlier models in the class (B93 and B95, respectively), but other than that, AMD has only added minimal improvements to the new chip. Nothing is going to reinvent the wheel here. The X4 97 is clocked at a speed of 3.2GHz, and will carry a 8MB cache. It will feature a 95W TDP and will use AMD’s AM3 processor socket.

For reference, the X4 B95 had a clockspeed of 3.0GHz and came with a 6MB cache, so the X4 97 is offering some improvements in the business class and is a fast processor, for sure. AMD is hoping that their lower prices and business-aimed marketing model will attract buyers and manufacturers away from the popular Core i5 and i7 chips from Intel. Some reports on the internet had highlighted the X4 97′s TDP of 95W as a feature over the Core i7 – not sure why when all Core i7 processors, save for the ultra-high-end i7-980x model, all have equal or less of a power footprint.

No word from AMD on when we can expect these new business chips, or what their pricing will be.