AMD Revamps the Line

AMD has just revisited the older naming conventions in its lineup, and with a partially new, partially old name, released a new chip, soon to be a complete line of dual core chips, from the start.

Right now, the only new dual cores are actually failed or crippled quad-core chips from the original Phenom line, which probably doesn’t make AMD very happy, as one way or the other, the yield is down, and so are the profits.

Now the company has released an Athlon II X2 chip, the very first dual core 45 nm process chip from their drawing boards.

Though not an ultimate performer, it should be very energy efficient, and use much less power than other chips running at high frequencies. The chip is the Athlon II X2 250, and operates at 3.0 GHz, has 128kB L1 cache, 1MB L2 cache per core, and no L3 cache at all. (I said it was not a performance model!)

It is, however, only spec’ed at 65W TDP, and will retail at $87.  AnandTech is reporting it will likely be the only processor in that lineup for some time; that is, until the Global Foundry gets up to speed on the 45nm process chips all around.

There is also another dual core chip announced, but it is one of those Phenom II chips with demoted core status. It is called the Phenom II X2 550 BE and is a Phenom II quad that runs at 3.1 GHZ, with 2 cores disabled, but the full 6 MB of L3 cache available. It will be retailed at $102, and while available, should be quite popular. This offering should eventually also fade away, as the number of Phenom II X4 chips that pass muster increases.

There are also 65W TDP quad core and triple core Phenom IIs being released, both coming at the lower end of the speed ranges, which can be seen completely in the AnandTech article here.

Nice to see some more choices, especially if you are building a home theater PC, as any of these less speedy, more efficient chips will work well in close quarters.

This comes right on the heels of an announcement of a new TV tuner chipset that will make things much easier on HTPCs, and work in tandem with any AMD video cards, using some of their rendering power both directly and indirectly.

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