When originally released, Phenom had a nick name of the black death. The TLB bug with the L3 cache caused serious stability and reliability problems and the only work around was to disable the L3 cache in the BIOS, removing any performance benefits the Phenom processor had over the Athlon X2 line. This, however, has thankfully now changed. BE stepping Phenoms removed this problem and since then a second generation Phenom II has emerged, which is one of the most impressive processors we have seen.