AMD's introduces affordable Athlon 64 X2 3600+

Now Intel has conquered AMD performance wise with the introduction of the Core 2 Duo processors, AMD is forced to sell their dual core processors for very low prices. Now AMD has another trick up its sleeves: the new AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ is a dual core chip with just 512 kB total L2 cache, only 256 kB for each of the cores. This way the new X2 processor can better be described as a 'Sempron X2'. With a price just under 140 dollars, the X2 3600+ is definitely very affordable. Xbit Labs already managed to get their hands on a sample of the new processor and ran some benchmarks. Here's a quote from their conclusion:

The obtained results indicate that the new low-cost AMD processor that has already started selling turned out a very attractive solution. Although Athlon 64 X2 3600+ features half the L2 cache compared with the "fully-fledged" dual-core Athlon 64 X2 CPUs and hence can be regarded as a "dual-core Sempron" at some point, its performance didn't suffer that much. In the worst case, Athlon 64 X2 3600+ is no more than 5% behind the 3800+ model with the same nominal clock speed of 2GHz. And in fact, there are very few applications like that. In other words, Athlon 64 X2 3600+ offers very decent performance, especially keeping in mind that it is less expensive than the 3800+ model.

Tags: casemodding

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