Our man FlanK3r has managed to get his hands on one of the first (and probably last) AMD CPUs that exploits the new Excavator architecture, and if performance in SuperPi 32M is anything to go by (and let’s be honest, it usually is) then AMD has a real done a very, very good job of squeezing as much performance as possible from the original ‘Bulldozer’ architecture.

The AMD Athlon X4 845 technically belongs to the Carrizo CPU family that AMD is now pushing into its mobile platforms and features four Excavator CPU cores each with a base clock of 3.5GHz turboing up to 3.8GHz. Unlike the Mobile chips which arrive as APUs with integrated GPUs, the X4 845 is a straight up CPU that slots into the AMD FM2+ desktop platform range. The X4 845 is manufactured using a 28nm process and features a 4MB L2 cache (no L3 cache) and a TDP of 65 watts.

After some minimal tweaking FlanK3r managed to get his X4 845 stable at 4218.1MHz completing a SuperPi 32M run in a very impressive 11min 28sec 523ms. Just for the sake of reference, a previous gen Kaveri chip clocked at 5GHz with fully tweaked memory pulls in a run a of more than 12mins. Let’s just repeat that for dramatic effect; at 4GHz, the Athlon X4 845 is 5 seconds faster than a Kaveri chip at 5GHz!

This is of course very interesting news for overclockers, especially those of us who harbor dreams of AMD one day actually regaining a competitive position in the desktop processor market.

Check out FlanK3r's submission on HWBOT here.