With the same E6 revision Toledo core as the Athlon 64 X2 4800+, you'd expect the FX-60 to have largely similar memory sub-system performance, given the memory controller on the processor. ScienceMark 2.0 largely tells us if that supposition is true or not, helping us to measure memory bandwidth and memory access latency. Bandwidth first.

The dual-core AMD processors, including FX-60, don't have quite the bandwidth of the single-core CPUs, despite sharing the same basic configuration on the memory controller. Shared access to the controller by the cores sees to that. The FX-60 performs just like the 4800+ in this test, as expected.

Still, 85 per cent utilisation is much better than the Intel systems can manage. The 955 and 3.73GHz XEs need a 266MHz CPU-to-system bus to grab comparative bandwidth.

Likewise, the dual-core AMD CPUs are slower at going out to main memory than their single-core counterparts, by around ten per cent. Their access latency is still years ahead of current Intel systems with off-chip MCHs.