AMD 65nm Athlon 64 X2 Processors with Slower L2?

Our friends at the Tech-Report have followed up their initial coverage of AMD's new 65nm Athlon 64 X2 processors with a deeper look into their performance. It turns out, the 65nm processors have higher latency access to their L2 cache, which hinders performance in some situations.

"After we published our first look at AMD's 65nm Athlon 64 X2 processors yesterday, some readers raised questions about funky performance numbers you'd seen from these 65nm CPUs at other sites. We focused on power consumption and overclocking in our initial look at the processors, assuming those would be the most interesting aspects of the die-shrunk parts, which were billed as otherwise offering performance identical to their 90nm predecessors. We should have known better, given the difference in L2 cache performance we noticed between 130nm and 90nm Athlon 64 processors during AMD's last die shrink."

Jeff will be posting our take on AMD's new processors in the comings days.  Be sure to check back often for the full scoop.