Athlon 64 X2
Hard Drive Recovery - Athlon 64 X2
Athlon 64 X2 is the first dual-core desktop CPU designed by AMD. Athlon 64 X2 is capable of decoding SSE3 instructions, so it can run and utilize software optimizations that were previously supported by only Intel chips.
Athlon 64 X2 consists of two Athlon 64 cores joined together on one die. The cores share one dual-channel memory controller. The cores are based on the E-stepping model of Athlon 64. Depending on the model, they have either 512 or 1024 KB of L2 Cache per core.
Dual core processors like X2 can process more software threads at the same time. This process of simultaneous execution of multiple threads is called thread-level parallelism (TLP). Because X2 has two cores on the same die, it doubles the TLP over a single-core Athlon 64 of the same speed. However, this feature of the X2 processors is not beneficial in programs that are written with one thread.
Since Athlon 64 X2 contains two cores, it uses more transistors, and thus making it more expensive. The 1-MB-L2-cache 90 nm Athlon 64 X2 processor is 219 mm² in size with 243 million transistors whereas its 1-MB-L2-cache 90 nm Athlon 64 counterpart is 103.1 mm² and has 164 million transistors.
AMD has also released the low-voltage variants of their low-end 65 nm Athlon 64 X2, named “Athlon X2″. The Athlon X2 processors feature reduced TDP of 45 W.
