AMD 65nm Athlon 64 X2 Processors with Slower L2?

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, December 21, 2006, 07:00 PM EDT

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.

Tags: AMD, 65nm, Processors, processor, CES, Athlon, X2, process, Athlon 64, pro, SSO, AM

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com