AMD ships desktop dual core Athlon 64

 

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By Steve Malone

Posted on 31 May 2005 at 11:16

Although it seems dual core Athlons have been around for ages, AMD has announced it has finally begun to ship the Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processor. The new processor range designed for desktops and desktop-replacement notebooks.

AMD expects to see the Athlon 64 X2 supported by most of the leading PC manufacturers including Acer, HP and Lenovo (nee IBM's PC division) and around 40 other OEMs worldwide.

AMD has made life easier for these companies by making the X2 design as compatible as possible with single core versions. AMD says that the X2 is in the same 939-pin configuration as the single-core AMD Athlon 64 processors. The only difference is that the dual core version needs a BIOS upgrade. AMD assures customers that all software designed for single core x86 processors will run without modification on the dual core version.

As with the similar dual core Opteron, the Athlon 64 X2 is a symmetrical multi-processing architecture built around a 90-nanometre process. By building two CPUs or cores onto a single piece of silicon, the performance of applications can increase dramatically. The difference will become even more pronounced as software developers begin to assume a multiprocessor target processor when writing new software.

Although they should be taken with a pinch of salt, AMD says its benchmarks show that existing multimedia applications show an average of a 34 per cent increase compared to similar single-core AMD Athlon 64 processors, while business application benchmarks show a 22 percent average rise.

AMD is already promising to introduce a dual-core version of the AMD Athlon 64 FX aimed at the gaming market when multi-threaded software games become available.

Each 64-bit core has a total of 128Kb of Level 1 divided into 64K of data and instruction caches respectively and 1Mb of Level 2 cache linked to a system request queue which manages each CPUs requests for memory and I/O. The two cores are linked together and to the system memory using AMD's tried and trusted direct connect architecture.

The AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processors are available at a range of clock speeds. The 4800+, 4600+, 4400+ and 4200+ are priced based on performance at $1001, $803, $581 and $537, respectively, in 1,000-unit quantities.

Analysis: AMD dual core technology