In a small blurb on ZDNet today, the under-the-radar release of the newest Phenom and Opteron chips with stepping code B3 is reported. The B3 stepping fixes the possible stall that was shown with the earlier processors. For those not up on all the minutiae, the first quad cores had a small bug that could, under certain conditions, cause the processor to stall. There was a BIOS fix that was issued almost immediately, but a performance hit was noted.

The new B3 versions of Opteron and Phenom chips have the letters “GH” at the end of the product number. Credit: Anandtech

This new revision of the chip has no performance problems, but is being released at the same 2.3 GHz speeds as the older processors. The thing that has most people eschewing the line is the lack of clock speed. Everyone is awaiting news of those 3 GHz parts coming down the pike. The AMD fans need something to cheer for soon, and having just a few of the ‘black’ version high clock speed pieces to lust after would do the trick. It would energize the market, and spur renewed interest by motherboard manufacturers (In case you haven’t noticed, AMD motherboards are in the minority by a fair margin, after enjoying the lion’s share of the market for several years). 

It may be that not much press will be given to these parts until they ship in volume, as the big news from AMD right now is the triple core chips, which seem to be headed straight into yeoman duty for Dell and HP desktops.

Perhaps with a few new people in the top spots and a good run of midrange processors AMD can make yet another return to the performance zenith.

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Tags: amd, phenom, opteron, b3 revision, dell, hp, triple core phenom, phenom 8000 series