AMD to Reveal New CPUs in June

Category: CPU's, General News
Posted: May 18, 2009 11:49AM
Author: MrAlex

AMD, the second largest manufacturer of microprocessors will officially reveal their two new series of processors, and along with that, two brand new processors. The new series AMD will reveal will be the AMD Athlon II X2 and the AMD Phenom II X2. They will be announced on 2nd of June 2009. The first chip to be revealed will be the AMD Athlon II X2 250, which is a Regor based CPU and comes at a stock speed of 3GHz, 2MB L2 Cache and 65W TDP. The next CPU to be revealed will be the long awaited Phenom II X2 550 and will be AMD’s first enthusiast dual-core processor in a while! It comes at 3.1GHz, 1MB L2 Cache, 6MB L3 Cache and a TDP of 80W; this should hopefully put most, if not all of Intel’s Core2Duos to shame. They both come with a DDR2/DDR3 memory controller, and are manufactured on a 45nm fabrication process. AMD sure are making a comeback!

Phenom II quad cores are still slower clock for clock than C2Q, this won't change. It will give them a competitive dual core part, but is it really necessary at this point? Unless they designed a new dual core chip, this will be a disabled/failed quad core. That means you waste silicon and the chip isn't any cheaper to produce. At least it gives them a very good mainstream part. Unfortunately, we all know Intel will respond with a price drop on the E8x00's.

They did design these new CPUs as dual-core and are not quad-core with disabled cores. At least that's what I've found by searching for AMD Regor. And the fact that they have the same clock speed as the quads but this time around a lower TDP would seem to agree with this. All the other times they just disabled a core, the TDP stayed the same as the quad. I'm excited to see this but I do agree that this will in no way be a C2D killer. I would hope that it will compete well against the E7xxx and E8xxx CPUs. And a price drop on those CPUs would be good too as the E8400 hasn't dropped in a LONG time. Plus maybe these will help bring out more AM3 motherboards. Particularly microATX ones.