AMD's "Black Box" Athlon 64 X2 6400+

MojoKid writes "Rumors of a new high-end AMD Athlon 64 X2 chip circulated in July, but availability and specifics of the chip were unconfirmed at the time. Now AMD has officially taken the wraps off their new Athlon 64 X2 6400+, a 3.2GHz dual-core chipset to compete with Intel's Core 2 E6750 and E6850 series. HotHardware notes that the new 6400+ is still built on AMD's 90nm fab process and has a single 2-GHz HyperTransport link and 2 MB of on-chip L2 cache (1 MB per core), just like its predecessor the 6000+. The new processor is said to be a 'channel only' offering and will retail at $239 or so, in a black retail box (picture here) without a heatsink."

Other price points

[Red_Foreman]

That's actually a very competitive price point for AMD. A Core 2 Duo clocked at 2.67 Ghz is $559 (reference) [extremetech.com]

Personally, I'd love one of these processors - especially for a datacenter that I manage. I noticed a huge increase in throughput when we switched over our datacenter from Windows Server to Red Hat Enterprise (x86_64), and I'm not sure the memory starved Intel chips can keep up with the AMD HyperTransport architecture.

(Until Intel leap-frogs AMD, then AMD leap-frogs Intel, and we all benefit!)

Geez ... only 125W TDP?

[tomstdenis]

What a bargain! Why didn't they just wait till 65nm? The same chip would probably fit in the 90W or less envelope at that size.

Personally, I'm happy with my E6600, which bangs along just fine at 2.4GHz and can easily outperform any Athlon at a similar speed [or at least match it].

Tom

will NOT retail for $239

[Lumpy]

$239 is at 1000 or more quantity. so it's wholesale pricing.

Newegg will probably retail it at $350 to $390 IF they buy a thousand of them. Most companies dont want to stock that much of a processor as the price drops so fat you are stuck with overpriced stock on hand.

Re:Aint Much of a Deal

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget about the nice hot & expensive FB-DRAM that you need with Intel. The total system cost will be lower for AMD.

Re:Other price points

[Amiga Lover]

I was busy watching the Conroe (which became Core 2 Duo) destroy everything AMD had to offer.

Remember that's only in synthetic benchmarks! Real world, AMD's memory bus still shreds anything intel has come up with except maybe their "Quad core" xeons, but even those are crippled by being two dual cores that choke their own buses! Despite the speed they run at, AMD is still king for real world.

Re:Taken the wraps off?

[Hoi Polloi]

Supposedly the real reason isn't some conspiracy of lawyers and evil bureaucrats but that Americans aren't as eager to jump on the latest and greatest as they are in parts of Asia. Dense countries like Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan have a more flexible mom & pop system of small electronics stores and a population that is eager to dump the device they have for the flavor of the month. In the US you have much larger and less flexible chains that prefer products with proven potential and a population that prefers low prices over technical innovation so we hold onto them longer. Bleeding edge enthusiasts may dispute this (they are overrepresented on slashdot) but the population in general in the US follows this trend.

According to this article [msn.com] other reasons include our not using GSM as a standard system, our fragmented carrier market, and our low demand for text messaging and other functions that we can already do on PCs (i.e. web browse).

Re:Other price points

[Anonymous Coward]

which blow HT out of the water

Typo? AMD's HyperTransport implementation is easily superior to the FSB on any available retail processor. The current Extreme parts are far better than, say, the Pentium 4 with Hyper-Threading, if that's the HT that you meant.