AMD Phenom II X4 N930 quad core processor
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AMD Phenom II X4 N930 processor, intended for notebooks has four cores and is clocked at 2.0 GHz. The missing Level 3 Cache in the mobile Phenom ii processors leads to visible lack in the performance. It performance level is therefore can be expected to be close to the similarly clocked 2 GHz Athlon II quad core processors.
The AMD Phenom II X4 N930 quad core processor has integrated DDR3 memory controller. The integrated memory controller makes the processor to memory transfer faster. This is one reason why the Phenom ii N930 is better than the Core 2 Duo Intel processor. The integrated memory controller also compensate, to some extent, for the missing L3 cache.
The biggest performance gain with the N930 will be in the cases where 4 processes are running concurrently, utilizing the 4 cores to the full extent.
AMD Phenom II X4 N930 quad core processor supports various instruction sets for multimedia related operation including MMX, 3DNow!, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4A.
The AMD Phenom II N930 has 512KB of level 2 Cache for each of the 4 cores to make up a total of 2048 KB of the Level 2 Cache. Manufactured with 45 nm technology, the N930 has a TDP rating of 35 Watts.
The quad core Phenom ii N930 does support Hardware virtualization, which helps when two operating systems are simultaneously loaded into the system. The support for the hardware virtualization make the swtitching between the operating systems faster.
The Phenom ii N930 communicates with the chipset using the HyperTransport Bus, which is 3600 MT/s ( Million Transfer per second), scalable, high bandwidth differential bus.
AMD Phenom II X4 N930 benchmarks
Several Benchmark data for the AMD Phenom II X4 N930 are available. The performance of the quad core is clearly visible with processes that stress all the four cores. For example the 3DMark score for the AMD Phenom II X4 N930 is close to 2825 while that of the core i3-330M has been found close to 2205 ( higher number is better). The SiSoft Sandra Dhrystone (MIPS) score for AMD Phenom II X4 N930 28000 as compared to 26976 for the intel core i3-330M
However, where the processes are single core intensive, the Phenom N930 quad core benchmarking results are not as impressive. The Super pi 2M calculation, for example takes 86 seconds with Phenom ii N930 based system as compared to, for example, 49 seconds with the Intel Core i3-330M.
The final verdict is – if you normally work on just one thing at a time ( or if you run a process that does not require more than one core at a time), this processor is not well suited for you. You may be better off with the core i3 based processors from intel. However, if you run multiple processes and threads you may benefit by the 4 cores in the Phenom ii N930
