Avoid AMD's Phenom ( or Barcelona ) for at least the next ..

See:-

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/13724

And let the buyer beware even after the new mas-versions are
available, as there are likely to be a lot of the old parts still
floating in the system.

Seems as if the huge $$ losses at AMD may have indirectly contributed
to a rush to market and less than thorough design and testing of
Barcelona and Phenom. The TLB problem should have been discovered in
pre-production test and not have thousands of chips released into the
wild. Reminds me of the Pentium 4 floating-point problems a few years
ago One big difference - Intel was not short of money and critically
dependent on a single design-family pulling them into the black. The
fact that BOTH Barcelona and Phenom are hit with exactly the same
design problem for which the current workarounds seem to cause a
serious performance hit is a potentially disastrous turn of events for
processor families already confronted with superior performance from
the competing Intel designs. Barcelona shipments are mostly halted
until a fix is in place -- so, how many production wafers using the
old masks are front-loaded into the system and will now need to be
trashed, adding to AMD's burden of financial woes ?

John Lewis