The improvements are manifest in a revised transistor count. Phenom II boasts roughly 758 million transistors, up from right around 450 million. As with its predecessor, the original Phenom, Phenom II drops into nearly every Socket AM2 motherboard. This gives the Phenom II broad appeal to the upgrade crowd, many of whom have long sought improved performance for their AMD systems.

The 900 series of AMD processors are all quad-core CPUs with a 6MB L3 cache, 2MB larger than the 800 series and the stock speed of the 955 BE was the fastest until it was superseded very recently by the 965 BE which clocks in at a whopping 3.4GHz.