AMD have announced two new dual core processors, both built on a 45nm process with the surprising news is that one of them carries the Athlon name. The first member of the new Athlon II X2 family is the 250 which has a clock speed of 3.0GHz. Based on the Regor core the 250 has no L3 cache which makes it smaller (117.5mm²) and cheaper to manufacture, but to make up for this AMD have given it 1MB of L2 cache per core.

Launched at the same time is the first dual core Phenom II, the Phenom

II X2 550 based on the 410mm² Callisto core. As the flagship of the new line, the X2 550 is a Black Edition meaning that it's unlocked so it can be overclocked past its 3.1GHz reference clock speed.  It comes with 1MB of L2 cache and 6MB of L3 cache shared between each core.

Both cores have a 2.0GHz HyperTransport bus frequency and support both DDR2 and 3, up to DDR2-1067 and DDR3-1600. The TDP of the Phenom II X2 550 is 80W while the Athlon II X2 250 is rated at 65W

We managed to overclock the Phenom II X2 550 to a stable 3.958GHz with ease, while the Athlon II X2 250 was more problematic, but eventually we got it to run stably at 3.72GHz.

UK pricing for the Athlon II X2 250 is around £69.99 while the Phenom II X2 550 costs approx. £80.99

For full test results see our results database reportlabs.com