“AMD in many cases delivers greater performance than the similarly priced Intel CPUs, but not nearly a large enough performance gap to make up for the difference in die size. Again, great for consumers, but potentially painful for AMD in the long run. As yields improve AMD should be able to make more of these cores members of the 900 family, but without a separate, smaller die there will still be economic inefficiencies at the lower end.”

“AMD’s Phenom II is very competitive, but the strategy does not have much long term staying power. AMD needs to introduce smaller die versions of its CPUs soon.”

Ask and you shall receive, right?

Intel did a bang up job tarnishing the Pentium name with its clock speed rampage during the Pentium 4 days, but the Athlon brand still holds a special place in our hearts.

This is the Athlon II, and it’s exactly what I’ve been asking for:

The Athlon II X2, to be specific, is a 45nm monolithic dual-core processor.  While the most recent Athlon X2s are derivatives of the original Phenom architecture, the Athlon II is based on the new and improved Phenom II architecture.

The name lives on

Take two Phenom II cores, increase their L2 caches to 1MB, leave out the L3 and you’ve got an Athlon II.  The entire die measures only 117.5 mm^2 and is made up of a meager 234 million transistors.  The table below compares the Athlon II’s die size to other competing parts:

The new Athlon II is actually AMD’s smallest dual core processor ever, even smaller than the original Athlon 64 X2.  It’s also AMD’s first 45nm dual-core processor.  It’s also AMD’s first Socket-AM3 processor to carry the Athlon brand (ok, I’ll stop).  As an AM3 chip it will work in both AM3 and AM2+ motherboards, just like the Phenom II.

The Athlon II is only launching with one model today the 3.0GHz Athlon II X2 250.  Priced at $87, it’s likely that we won’t see more Athlon II X2s until AMD is ready to further switch its lineup over to 45nm in order to keep up with demand.

The Phenom II X2 550 BE

We actually get two new dual-core chips today, the second is the new Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition.  Like all of the other chips in the Phenom II lineup, the X2 550 is simply a die-harvested Phenom II X4 part.  In other words, what we have is a quad-core Phenom II with two of its cores disabled.  Given that it’s still fairly early in GlobalFoundries’ 45nm manufacturing process, it makes sense to see so many harvested parts.  I would expect these Phenom II X2 and perhaps even the X3 derivatives to either disappear or shift out of the limelight as AMD’s yields improve.

Because it’s based on the quad-core Phenom II processor, the X2 550 BE has a full 6MB L3 cache that the two cores can share.  The L2 caches are still stuck at 512KB but with a large 6MB L3, there’s very little to complain about.  The unlocked Black Edition part runs at 3.1GHz and retails for $102.

Availability and New Energy Efficient Phenom IIs

AMD is expecting availability for both of these parts in the next week or so.

The table below shows AMD’s new lineup with these two chips.  Note that I’ve also included data on the Phenom II X4 905e and the Phenom II X3 705e.  These two CPUs run at 2.5GHz and have a 65W TDP, down from 125W and 95W for all previous AM3 parts.

And just for kicks here's a specs table with both AMD and Intel CPUs in it: