Meet AMD's New AM2 Family of Processors

A Chip Round Up At the Ol' AMD Corral

Around the time of Memorial Day each year, we get the product announcements of new desktop chips. This year, AMD went first with updates across their entire desktop product line. This follows right after last week when they announced their new Turion 64 X2 Processor.

The biggest change is that AMD made it official that the new chips will fit in their AM2 socket. This means that the 939 socket is now not the latest motherboard design for AMD devotees. Their new AM2 socket takes advantage of faster DDR2 memory, although benchmarks thus far don't show any speed increase over existing motherboards. The enthusiasts may be a little disappointed at this for now, but many saw it coming. The one advantage is that all the new chips fit in the AM2 socket, so the line is not fragmented into 939 performance, and 754 value lines, and the motherboards and chips are more interchangeable across the entire line.

First up is an update to the flagship FX processor line. The newest FX chip is the FX-62. This is a dual core design that sports 1 MB cache per core, and a clock speed of 2.8 GHz. This is a 200 MHz jump up from the FX-60. There is a steep price of admission of $1031, so start saving up if you're interested in having the fastest chip on the block- at least for this week as Intel is getting quite ready to challenge that claim real soon. See some FX-62 benchmarks here.

The big news in the dual cores for the rest of us is the X2 5000+ processor. This has a 2.6 GHz frequency, and 512KB of cache per core. While this runs 200 MHz faster than the 4800+ X2, the cache is halved as it is 1 MB per core in the 4800+. At the very least, the 5000+ should push prices down across the X2 line. The 5000+ is expected to fetch $696, not exactly budget territory. The other new chip is a 4000+ X2. The 4000+ runs at 2 GHz, with 1 MB of cache per core. It has twice the cache of the X2 3800+, and should put a cool $328 dent in your wallet to have it in your box. Unfortunately, we didn't get the X2 3500+ I've been waiting for to compete with Intel's 805 budget dual core.

There will be two single core Athlon 64 chips made for the AM2 socket. They are the 3500+, and the 3800+. Curiously, the fastest Athlon 64, the 4000+ is listed as 939 only for now, and not AM2. If I were a betting man, I'd think that it would make the jump to AM2. From the specs, it appears that the clock speed and cache remain the same for the 3500+ and 3800+ in AM2 form. They are listed at $189, and $290 respectively, the same price as their 939 counterparts.

To keep competitive with the Celeron, AMD updated their budget line as well. Semprons are expected in the following designations for the AM2 socket: 3000+, 3200+, 3400+, 3500+, 3600+. They range in price from an affordable $77 to a still affordable $123 for the top 3600+ part. The 3200+, as well as the faster 3500+ and 3600+ processors are unique to the AM2 socket. While the 3600+ and 3500+ parts both run at a clock speed of 2 GHz, the 3600+ gets 256 KB of cache, and the 3500+ a mere 128 KB of cache. We'll have to wait and see if AMD did too good of a job of hobbling the 3500+ part with such paltry cache. Similarly, the 3200+ Sempron has only 128 KB of cache and a 1.8 GHz speed so don't expect it to be a screamer for $87. Repeat after me: affordable computing. The higher end Semprons biggest competition may come from the older Athlon 64 chips.

Now we've met the entire AM2 family, from the top end FX-62, to the downright cheap Sempron 3000+. There certainly is a chip for every budget. Stay tuned, as Intel is expected to announce their latest chips quite in the next few months. While the AM2 socket per se didn't intrigue me much, some of the new chips offered for it did. Of course, I'm still waiting for my X2 3500+. Maybe next round...

AMD's chart with prices here.

--Jonas