The reports we’ve been getting on the coming 45nm Deneb core have been rather disappointing overall. Even though engineers have been able to push individual samples to more than 3.0GHz, AMD doesn’t have any headroom to launch mass produced processor operating at higher frequencies than we have today. At least not initially, and right now it doesn’t seem like there will be any 3.0GHz retail processor anytime soon. The overclocker might want to take a look at Deneb in any case, because the results posted over at itocp.com shows some promise.
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Forum user sunny got his hands on engineering samples of both the 2.2GHz and 2.3GHz model, names are still pending. His main goal seems to have been to find the highest stable frequency that would pass SuperPi 1M. He got past 3.0GHz fairly easily and eventually landed on 3441MHz, with air cooling and a lot of voltage. SuperPi 1M took 20.515 seconds to complete.
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The larger 6MB L3 cache is the most obvious upgrade from the current 65nm core, but we suspect that SuperPi might not be the best application to show test it. The BIOS support seemed to limit his efforts, which means that there might be more to expect from the retail samples and a good motherboard.
In any case, AMD is getting close to launching its 45nm processors, but the focus seems to be on getting better yields, lower power consumption, lower heat dissipation and lower prices. Performance is secondary, although in the hands of a skilled user it seems like there is at least more to fetch than with the current lineup.
