AMD's release of the Phenom processor along with the Spider platform was not exactlya head turner. Well, maybe the other way. There has been a lot of confusion, benchmarks chasing each other, whether they were relevant or not and by the end of the day, the entire platform is still a mystery. We took the current flagship edition, that is, the Phenom 9900 and pitted it against the Phenom 9600 Black Edition with the lower speed NorthBridge. We ran AOD and different memory frequencies and then compared the results with whatever competition is out there. We also did some more research into Erratum 298 and the bug it describes along with possible scenarios where it can occur and the workaround solution a.k.a. patch that could be worse than the bug itself. And that is not just in terms of performance. Let me give you a hint: it was pretty exciting....