B2 Stepping – TLB Bug is Still Around

In November of last year, AMD introduced the Phenom CPU its first quad-core processor. However, the chipmaker had to cancel the 2.4 GHz model, which was meant to launch as the flagship, at the very last minute due to a bug in the Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB).

Due to this error, there is an increased chance that the Phenom may crash the system under very rare and unusual circumstances. This may occur when lines of code are transformed into physical addresses in the L3 cache while there is simultaneously a large amount of data traffic. To put your mind at ease, let us say at this point that this is a scenario that does not occur with normal desktop applications. Also, we didn’t encounter this phenomenon during any of our tests. Nonetheless, AMD decided to play it safe and not sell any Phenom processors running faster than 2.30 GHz.

The Phenom 9600 Black Edition continues to use this faulty B2 stepping. We can’t really understand why AMD sells this CPU specifically as an overclocker part regardless. Currently, there are three Phenom models, all of which use the B2 stepping.