AMD's Athlon II X2 550, CPU on the Cheap

While the latest and greatest quad-cores are all the rage sometimes you just need a basic chip for those tasks that don’t demand all that much and those situations where you want lower power usage a look at dual-core chips is in order.

Techtree has a look at the AMD Athlon II X2 550 processor which features cores similar to that of the Phenom II lineup with some cache missing here and there. Here’s a peek:

Unlike the Phenom II X2, which has two cores disabled, the Athlon die features just two cores in total. In fact, the die goes by a new name Regor, which is derived from the Phenom II core. The L2 cache has been toned down a bit to 2MB and the L3 cache has been done away with. Since it is based on socket AM3, it features both a DDR2 and DDR3 memory controller. The total memory system memory bandwidth remains the same at 33.1GB/s. One more advantage of the new Athlon II is a lower TDP of 65W, compared with 80W of the Phenom II X2.

An interesting and snappy chip which shouldn’t set you back all that much.