Athlon X2 7850?
HEXUS took an in-depth look at the AMD Athlon X2 7750 Black Edition chip back in December of last year.Up until today the 2.7GHz-clocked chip was the fastest of a family of 'Kuma' processors - dual-core Athlons based on the 65nm Phenom architecture. AMD's trick in pulling a dual-core chip out of a monolithic quad-core design was to switch off a couple of cores that failed to make either the triple- and quad-core grades and then rebadge them up as Athlons. Why waste any silicon, right?
Thinking along the lines of first-generation Phenom, the Athlon X2 7750 BE shipped with 1MB of L2 cache (512KB per core) and 2MB of shared L3 cache. Our verdict of the chip, priced at £75 at the time, was 'harvesting the Phenom architecture for dual-core ends, AMD's not made many price-related performance gains, but it now has a dual-core architecture that should scale well through 2009, especially as a move to 45nm production is a given.'
AMD's now introduced the Athlon X2 7850 Black Edition - ostensibly a faster-clocked version of the incumbent. Head on over to page two to see where it stacks up against the existing hierarchy.
