We’ve learned that soon-to-launch Phenom 9950 will dissipate 140W. The motherboard manufacturers are currently testing their boards to see if they can take it, but most of the boards that can cope with 125W will be able to take care of 140W.
Once you overclock your 125W TDB Phenom 9850 your TDP jumps up anyway, and the board that will let Phenom 9850 overclock will also take good care of Phenom 9950.
Phenom 9950 will be the last quad-core consumer CPU with the highest clock manufactured in 65nm and the next step will come as soon as AMD gets the 45nm parts ready.
AMD Phenom X4 9950 to dissipate 140W
The Phenom X4 9850 processor that was recently released was a good processor despite the fact that it used a lot of power compared to Intel’s competitively priced quad-core processors. According to this report only one more 65nm Phenom quad-core processor, the 9950, but that it will push out more than 140W of power to get to its target 2.6 GHz clock rate. That’s pretty damn hot and I imagine that it is indeed to the top levels AMD will reach though it won’t be able to compete in terms of Intel’s high end performance still.