AMD announced the dual-core Athlon 64 X2 on 22 April. The chip won't ship until June, when it will be formally launched. Until then, all we have to go on is the pre-release technical preview kit AMD has been hawking of late, writes Leo Waldock.
It's not a fully fledged Athlon 64 X2-based PC but an Asus A8N SLi Deluxe mobo fitted with 1GB of Corsair 3200XL Pro memory and an Athlon 64 X2 4800+.
There are four chips in the Athlon 64 X2 family, all of which share a number of features with each other and with single-core Athlon 64s. Athlon 64 X2 continues to use Socket 939; the fabrication process is 90nm using SOI (silicon on insulator); the 128-bit memory controller is compatible with PC1600, PC2100, PC2700 and PC3200 DDR, although you'd be barking mad to use anything but top-notch memory; and there's one bi-directional 1GHz Hyper Transport link. This gives an effective data bandwidth of 14.4GBps (8GBps x 1 HyperTransport link + 6.4GBps memory bandwidth). The X2 has 64KB of L1 instruction cache and 64KB of L1 data cache, just like Athlon 64.
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