The Athlon II X2 & Phenom II X2: 45nm Dual-Core from AMD

The Athlon II X2 & Phenom II X2: 45nm Dual-Core from AMD

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:

Processor	Cores	Manufacturing Process	L1 Cache	L2 Cache	L3 Cache	Die Size	Transistor Count
AMD Phenom II X2	2	45nm	128KB per core	1MB	6MB	258 mm2	758M
AMD Athlon II X2	2	45nm	128KB per core	1MB per core	0MB	117 mm2	234M
AMD Athlon X2	2	65nm	128KB per core	512KB per core	2MB	285 mm2	450M
AMD Athlon 64 X2	2	65nm	128KB per core	512KB per core	0MB	126 mm2	154M
Intel Pentium for Desktop	2	45nm	64KB per core	2MB	0MB	82 mm2	228M

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.