Introduction

Is your neighborhood full of those annoying speed bumps? You know those obstacles that the city or county places about every 200 feet on our neighborhood roads to stop speeding. The concept behind them is good, slow down traffic to make it’s residents safe and less likely to be hit by a speeding car. I personally see some bad sides, being in the fire service, neighborhoods that have these speed bumps, slow us down to a point where an extra two to three minutes may be added to a response. I also have friends who live in some of these neighborhoods that are experiencing tire or suspension problems due to the constant pounding taken by their vehicles.

Not all speed bumps are bad and some can be beneficial, for example, when there are many children present, around schools or play grounds or when a processor manufacturer releases some familiar CPUs with an increase in speed to give a little bump to their performance. There are also some other bumps that the consumer can benefit from, these would be lower TDPs. Lowering the TDP of a processor doesn’t suggest lowering performance it makes the processor more efficient and helps with your system's total power consumption.

AMD has announced the release of 5 processors, some of which are speed bumps, or increases in speed, while one has a decrease in wattage, lowering its TDP from 125W to 65W.  The processors which will receive an increase in speed will be the entire Athlon II line from dual to quad cores, as well as the dual core Phenom II. The processor which will have a change in TDP, making it more efficient, will be the Phenom II X4 910.