AMD Athlon 2650e and AMD Athlon X2 3250e
Remember a while back when we were last talking about AMD and how they, possibly, might be a wild card in this low power CPU game? The AMD Athlon 64 2000+ stacked up pretty well against the Intel Atom despite being clocked 600 mhz slower, so here comes two new CPUs on the near horizon from AMD: an Athlon running at 1.6ghz and one running at 1.5ghz. Sound interesting?
Frankly, I’m more interested in the Athlon 2650e, so let’s look at the Athlon X2 3250e first. It’s looking to be your basic Athlon X2 (that’s their dual-core line) processor, only it’s clocked low at 1.5ghz. Of course, that 1.5ghz means you’re still, effectively, getting two CPUs and that there’s a lot of room for performance there, especially when you consider this appears to be a full desktop chip and not an ultra-low voltage (ULV) stripped down chip (like the Atom). So with this power comes the price of heat. Granted, a TDP of 22 watts isn’t that much, lower is better. For those who seek energy efficiency, they may want to look at the next offering.
Enter the AMD Athlon 2650e, a very low-power chip running at 1.6ghz. I’m not certain that this is a full-blown desktop chip, but considering the Athlon 64 2000+ is, only massively clocked down, it’d make sense that this one is as well (it may be that the official name is “AMD Athlon 64 2650e” but the report doesn’t include the “64″ in the name. If that’s the case, then yes, it’s a full desktop chip). Assuming (which is dangerous, of course) that this is a full desktop chip, it should be more than capable of being the workhorse of a small media server, and with a TDP of 15 watts, it’s not a huge difference from the Athlon 3250e, but for those who don’t need the dual core chip, it’s a good alternative that should run cooler and be more energy efficient.
My big question at this point is whether AMD can get a form factor small enough to really benefit this intriguing addition to the market. They have a couple of great nettop class processors (or better, really), but they don’t have a small enough form factor to really benefit from that. The Geode just isn’t powerful enough, but if they can cram one of these onto a mini-itx (or smaller) board, they’re in business. Niche business, perhaps, but business.
DigiTimes has more on the AMD Athlon 2650e and the AMD Athlon X2 3250e.
the name of the processor is:
AMD Athlon(tm) Processor 2650e
actually I got both chips on hand
What do you think of them? I’m always interested in actual real world, hands-on impressions in comparison to various benchmarks.
Acer Aspire 5515 with 2650e
Vista Experience Processor Socre = 3.4
Geekbench Scores:
Overall: 1195
Summary
Section Description Score Geekbench Score
Geekbench 2.1.0 for Windows x86 (32-bit)
Integer Processor integer performance 1145
Floating Point Processor floating point performance 1424
Memory Memory performance 966
Stream Memory bandwidth performance 1031
System Information
Operating System Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic
Model Acer Aspire 5515 Motherboard Acer Nile
Processor AMD Athlon(tm) Processor 2650e Processor ID AuthenticAMD Family 15 Model 127 Stepping 2
Processors 1 Cores 1
Processor Frequency 1.60 GHz Bus Frequency 200 MHz
L1 Instruction Cache 64.0 KB L1 Data Cache 64.0 KB
L2 Cache 512 KB L3 Cache 0.00 B
Memory 2.75 GB Memory Type 0 MHz
BIOS Acer V1.00
Integer Section
Section Score 1145
Blowfish
single-threaded scalar 972
42.7 MB/sec
Blowfish
multi-threaded scalar 1041
42.7 MB/sec
Text Compress
single-threaded scalar 1124
3.60 MB/sec
Text Compress
multi-threaded scalar 1092
3.59 MB/sec
Text Decompress
single-threaded scalar 1226
5.04 MB/sec
Text Decompress
multi-threaded scalar 1264
5.04 MB/sec
Image Compress
single-threaded scalar 1114
9.21 Mpixels/sec
Image Compress
multi-threaded scalar 1082
9.11 Mpixels/sec
Image Decompress
single-threaded scalar 987
16.6 Mpixels/sec
Image Decompress
multi-threaded scalar 969
15.8 Mpixels/sec
Lua
single-threaded scalar 1437
553.5 Knodes/sec
Lua
multi-threaded scalar 1432
551.1 Knodes/sec
Floating Point Section
Section Score 1424
Mandelbrot
single-threaded scalar 1105
735.3 Mflops
Mandelbrot
multi-threaded scalar 1137
744.0 Mflops
Dot Product
single-threaded scalar 530
256.3 Mflops
Dot Product
multi-threaded scalar 558
254.4 Mflops
Dot Product
single-threaded vector 1464
1.75 Gflops
Dot Product
multi-threaded vector 1707
1.78 Gflops
LU Decomposition
single-threaded scalar 979
871.1 Mflops
LU Decomposition
multi-threaded scalar 974
854.0 Mflops
Primality Test
single-threaded scalar 1354
202.3 Mflops
Primality Test
multi-threaded scalar 1015
188.5 Mflops
Sharpen Image
single-threaded scalar 1359
3.17 Mpixels/sec
Sharpen Image
multi-threaded scalar 1407
3.24 Mpixels/sec
Blur Image
single-threaded scalar 3172
2.51 Mpixels/sec
Blur Image
multi-threaded scalar 3183
2.50 Mpixels/sec
Memory Section
Section Score 966
Read Sequential
single-threaded scalar 1317
1.61 GB/sec
Write Sequential
single-threaded scalar 1571
1.08 GB/sec
Stdlib Allocate
single-threaded scalar 508
1.90 Mallocs/sec
Stdlib Write
single-threaded scalar 629
1.30 GB/sec
Stdlib Copy
single-threaded scalar 806
851.2 MB/sec
Stream Section
Section Score 1031
Stream Copy
single-threaded scalar 1185
1.62 GB/sec
Stream Copy
single-threaded vector 1328
1.72 GB/sec
Stream Scale
single-threaded scalar 1133
1.47 GB/sec
Stream Scale
single-threaded vector 1210
1.63 GB/sec
Stream Add
single-threaded scalar 669
1.01 GB/sec
Stream Add
single-threaded vector 1168
1.62 GB/sec
Stream Triad
single-threaded scalar 680
963.1 MB/sec
Stream Triad
single-threaded vector 878
1.64 GB/sec
What is the Windows Experience Score on this chip?
Gordon, the windows experience score for this processor is 3.4, i have one in a eMachines D620 Laptop and its brilliant