Official Phenom II 4.0+ Chart

[Jazzman]

I'd guess that this is the secret behind Denebs high overclocability:


The PFET performance improvement is more dramatic with drive current now up to 660 µA/µm compared with 510 µA/µm on 65-nm transistors. Again, this increased output current is the result of optimized compressive strain for the p-channel device. The new design of the PFET moves the embedded silicon-germanium source/drain regions closer to the channel to maximize the transfer of stress, thereby increasing hole mobility. Although shorter gate lengths are not driving the improvements, it is a reduction in dimensions that allows increased channel stress to provide the performance scaling. AMD 45-nm PFET design reduces the space from embedded silicon-germanium to the channel edge by half.

The transistor drive current for AMD's 45-nm devices is much lower than that of the Intel HKMG transistors. But power consumption is quickly becoming a high priority for server chips. AMD's transistors exhibit very low channel leakage. Our transistor benchmarks indicates that leakage current is less than one-third of the value measured on AMD's 65-nm process. It's also significantly lower than the Intel 45-nm HKMG process. In fact the Ion/Ioff ratio for AMD's PFET is nearly 10 times better than that for the Intel PFET.

PURE SPECULATION WARNING: If I read the above right, then high-k metal gates in the FX models will provide even more overclocking potential. Since i7 has metal gates, wouldn't the above chip design plus metal gates allow FX to leapfrog i7 overclocking performance. I mean if you can get 4.0+ without metal gates on a Phenom II then the chip should turbocharge forward with the FX design that has metal gates.....