AMD spins dual-core Phenom Cartwheel
K10 goes budget
AMD has unveiled two new dual-core Athlons intended for low-cost home PCs.
On Monday, the beleaguered chip manufacturer rolled out what it's calling the 2.5GHz Athlon X2 7550 and the 2.7GHz Athlon X2 7750 Black Edition. Previously, dual-core Athlons used AMD's aging K8 microprocessor design, but these chips benefit from the newer K10 (aka "10h") architecture at the heart of its Phenom processors: the triple-core Phenom X3 and the quad-core Phenom X4.
Both dual-core chips include a 256KB Level 1 data cache, 1MB of L2 cache (512KB per core), and a 2MB shared L3 cache. And both support HyperTransport 3.0.
The 2.7GHz X2 7750 Black Edition is priced at $79. And the 2.5GHz X2 7550 is unpriced, as it's available only to PC manufacturers.
Like the triple- and quad-core Phenom models, these X2 7000 series chips are manufactured on AMD's older 65nm process. They're meant for low-cost desktops based on AMD's "Cartwheel" platform. Cartwheel also includes AMD's 780G chipset, built around ATI Radeon 3200 integrated graphics. ®
COMMENTS
Smart move?
Face it, everyone is happilly saving themselves into a recession, not many people are spalshing out on killer home systems, so having a budget part that still offers excellent perfromance for 95% of home users is a good thing, and if it uses up otherwise defunct chips then it saves money for AMD as well. If I was AMD, my worry would be that this may take sales from the newer CPUs as cash-strapped punters look for a bargain option
Interesting
My family is pretty much split down the line when it comes to what powers it with the processor..mine is a AMD Athlon 64 X2 Black Edition whilst my parents is a Celeron Dual Core (Core 2 chip, but with lower cache and the Celeron name"
I will be upgrading to a phenom at some stage next year, So i will be very interested to see how this pans out.
AMD need something to get back into the market.
The great chip shop dichotomy
I hear that these are in fact 4 core chips with 2 defunct cores turned off.
So effectively a Phenom X4^h3^h2
Is this down to yield being poor? or is this AMD trying to get rid of old 65nm parts before they introduce 4 core 45nm chips?
Either way, I think this shows how the chip manufactures are now serving the general PC user as a secondary concern.
It's pretty easy to see by looking at the metrics that the general public would get more benefit from a purpose designed higher speed 2 core chip (e.g. the now somewhat dated Core 2 Duo).
Meanwhile, the chip giants seem intent on forcing reduced cache multi core server parts at us whilst sidestepping questions about who really needs 8 concurrently executing threads.
Up until now, the majority of people buying new chips that are faster than their previous system. Soon though, Core 2 Duo users running at >3Ghz are going to be looking for a new I7 system and finding that they will have to pay upwards of 1k$ for the CPU just to get processor parity for single or dual threaded operation.
Will you pay for that?
