AMD's mainstream Phenom II processors should rekindle the competition with Intel for clock speed, according to a collection of reports of an AMD demonstration session. Based on the recently unveiled Shanghai architecture being used for new Opterons, the quad-core desktop chips should make a modest leap to 3GHz in official clock speeds but will have room for overclocking previously only available with Intel's Core 2 chips. An example tested by AMD is capable of running reliably at 4GHz with fan-based cooling and shows the company could upgrade the clock speed to match or beat Intel if necessary.

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