AMD spins four cores at 3.7GHz with the Phenom II 980 Black Edition

CHIP DESIGNER AMD has released its fastest clocked processor to date with the Phenom II X4 980 Black Edition.

AMD has slowly been upping the frequency of its Phenom II chips for a while now and with the Phenom II 980 Black Edition it has managed to spin the four cores at an impressive 3.7GHz. Technically AMD's top-of-the-line six-core Phenom II X6 1100T can run three cores at 3.7GHz through its turbo mode, but AMD has finally managed to run four cores at that base clock frequency.

The Phenom II 980 Black Edition will sit on top of AMD's high-end range, offering enthusiasts something to buy for less than £121 ($200) and with an unlocked multiplier, the promise of easy overclocking. Whether there is much headroom above 3.7GHz remains to be seen.

While AMD pushed the boundaries of its quad-core processor line-up it also released the Radeon E6760 embedded graphics chip that brings OpenCL support and the ability to output to six displays. The GPU chip is being pushed towards embedded designs rather than add-in graphics boards.

AMD's Radeon E6760 certainly looks the part considering its intended market. With 480 stream processors and a 128-bit memory bus connecting it to 1GB of GDDR5, there's a good deal of horsepower. There's support for Microsoft's DirectX 11, the aforementioned OpenCL GPGPU langauge, and HDMI 1.4 and Displayport 1.2 outputs.

AMD says that the Radeon E6760 can be paired with its Llano A-series accelerated processing units, claiming it will boost graphics performance.

Unlike AMD's consumer line of Radeon HD boards, don't expect the E6760 to tip up on store shelves but in industrial products over the next few years. µ