Processor AMD Athlon 64 X2 - the legendary past of the CPU manufacturer

The AMD Athlon 64 X2 processor is obsolete, both physically and morally. Such devices
Were presented in the distant 2006. These were the first multi-core solutions
Company AMD. To assess their importance to date is not difficult. Their release was the first evolutionary step of this manufacturer in the field of high-tech solutions. It was he who significantly influenced the development of the computer industry. Now you will not be surprised by 8 nuclear CPUs. This has already become the norm. But then a similar decision produced a kind of revolution, the fruits of which we still use today.

History

The first 2-core CPU in the niche of home PCs was the product of the eternal competitor AMD - the company Intel. It was a Pentium processor with the XE 840 index. It was installed in socket 775, which was the main one at that time. The increase in the number of nuclei caused the need to reduce the clock frequency. This has led to performance degradation in single-threaded applications. A similar result was obtained by the product of its constant competitor - the AMD Athlon 64 X2 processor. But due to the fact that such solutions were initially focused on multithreading, the effect was not so strong as the main competitor. With the advent of software, which is able to fully load two physical cores, the alignment of forces has gradually changed. And such solutions gradually replaced the CPU with the first core of everyday use. Yes, now such devices are still sold, but they are mostly used for office PCs, where the work in office applications and the low cost of the finished system come to the fore. And for gaming systems it is recommended to take 4, 6 or 8 cores. In an extreme case, you can stop the choice and on 2 cores, but this will significantly affect the quality of the game not for the better. Such a layout was laid more than 5 years ago, and one of its founders is the AMD Athlon 64 X2 processor.

Modifications

Initially, such CPUs were installed in socket 939, which was the most progressive for this manufacturer at that time. Immediately 4 models of the processor were presented. The youngest of these was the AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200. The rest had a similar name, but differed in the index. There were modifications 4400, 4600, and the flagship of this line had an index of 4800. Also mandatory attribute of the designations of these CPUs was "+", which was added at the end of the name. The frequency of the base model was 2200 MHz. Also among the architectural features worth noting cache, the size of which the younger model had 1Mb. At the same time, each of the nuclei accounted for only half of it. Other modifications could boast of higher frequency and increased cache size.

More recent solutions

A little later, more productive products appeared on the market. Logical development in this direction was the emergence of such CPUs for the AM2 platform. The cache size was similar to that of the predecessor. But the frequencies have significantly grown and amounted, for example, to the CPU of the AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000 - 2700 MHz. Also, another innovation was the support for new memory, which was called DDR2. But, in principle, these processors, the period between the appearance of which is slightly less than 2 years, a lot in common.

Conclusion

The AMD Athlon 64 X2 processor is one of the founders of the era of parallel computing on a single chip. If you look closely at it, you can easily find much in common with the new AMD solutions. And there is nothing surprising, because they are built on a similar architecture, which for the past 5 years has undergone certain changes, but also retained similarities.