Semiconductors sometimes suffer from a rare disease where
one of processor of the same series can take much more voltage than the other one. In AMD’s
case, once they manufacture a wafer with cca. 200 Deneb 45 nm cores, some of
them end up faulty.
Believe it or not, according to AMD testing standards TWKR doesn’t
qualify as a CPU that can get under AMD warranty agreement as it's much better
than it is suppose to be. This happens to one out of 200 CPUs on wafer, as we reported here.
AMD targets overclocking population and first batch of these
CPUs will be for overclockers and reviewers and at some point, if the press and
overclockers are happy with it, AMD might even consider to selling these CPUs.
AMD believes that this CPU should overclock much better than
any Phenom 955 clocked at reference 3.2GHz as it can take much more voltage.
TWKR is a very expensive part for AMD as it has to be cherry picked and
specially tested by hand and therefore even if AMD decides to sell them, it will
be a very limited, and possibly very expensive part.