With a default core clock of 3.2ghz this is the fastest dual core Phenom II that AMD offer.

On top of this the Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition uses AMD’s ‘Callisto’ core. Which is essentially a quad core ‘Deneb’ with two cores disabled.


The 555 Black Edition.

As with all of AMD’s recent AM3 chips the Phenom II X2 555 BE works with both AM3 and AM2+ motherboards due to its identical socket layout and inbuilt DDR2 and DDR3 memory controllers.

The chip supports full hardware virtualization allowing virtual machine environments to be run that function with the relevant hardware.


The AM3 socket with 938 pins.

The chips C3 revision adds hardware C1E states. This means the Phenom II X2 555 BE can disable cores to save power when idling.

Looks like a fully featured chip. It’ll be interesting to see how it performs.