AMD's latest is Limited by design.
AMD's Athlon chips have been revered with legendary status in their long and illustrious lives; the lineage goes from the Thunderbird and all the way up to the bloody good Athlon 64. What we have here isn't AMD's premium CPU by a long shot however, instead slotting in as the ultra-value cheapie chip. The company's stripped a lot out of this Athlon to get the price down so low, but what was axed makes this chip a pretty average choice.
Still built on the 45nm manufacturing process that all of AMD's current lineup are, the die is codenamed Regor to indicate this specific lineup. It only has 234 million transistors, and a small die size of 117.5mm2, with a Thermal Design Power of 65W. The chip is packaged on the AM3 socket which means that it contains an integrated DDR3/DDR2 memory controller, which gives plenty of bandwidth. This is no longer a feature that is exclusive to AMD since the introduction of Intel's Nehalem, but the dual compatibility still gives you a nice choice.
AMD's engineers have taken to the die with a large blade, slicing away a great many essential components that aid performance. Most noticeable is the L3 cache - a whopping 6MB of it is on the Phenom II 550, featured last Issue for only $145 - but here there's no L3 cache here whatsoever. We've only got the small L1 Data/Instruction caches at 64kb per core, and 1MB of L2 cache per core for a total of 2MB. The loss of so much speedy cache definitely has an impact on benchmarks, with wPrime taking a significant performance hit and other multithreaded apps suffering. Typically the two cores will 'fight' over available L3 cache depending on their need, splitting it up according to processing load, but the limited space in this budget chip leaves them with a very antiquated amount of headroom.
This is definitely a value chip, and as such doesn't come with an unlocked multiplier. Sitting at 15x stock, it can be lowered down to 4x in half-increment steps but not increased, meaning that the HT bus will require increasing from the stock 200MHz to give any increase in speed. Also of note is that AMD is finally listing these chips as being manufactured by its spinoff fab GlobalFoundries, something that made a lot of financial sense to them at the time.
Throwing the chip underneath our TRUE heatsink and setting the benchmarks going gave us pretty average results - for a CPU from a few years back. We got lower scores across the board compared to a Phenom II 550, though the heat generated under load wasn't even enough to make the heatsink noticeably warm compared to room temperature. The ability to be cooled by a breeze notwithstanding, stock performance was quite disappointing considering you can spend a little more and grab that Phenom II, but what about when overclocked?
While this was a bit quirky to begin with thanks to Cool N Quiet dropping the multi to 4x even when running benchmarks; we turned that off and eventually managed to tweak a final HT speed of 252MHz at the stock multi of 15x, giving a final speed of 3787MHz. This felt quite low, so the multi was brought down two steps to 14x and the HT increased to its highest limit. Unfortunately not even a multi drop helped; hitting 270MHz to reach a final 3780MHz.
With a lower performance across the board, worse overclocking performance and no L3 cache, this is a silly choice for practically any build.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012