Athlon X2 7750: AMD’s unnamed Phenom X2

Yesterday, while scouting around for that elusive Phenom II X4, I chanced upon this new processor SKU from AMD — the Athlon 64 X2 7750 BE @ 2.7GHz. It’s the first time I saw this Black Edition processor in the shelves. Curiosity got the better of me so I grabbed a unit and assembled a rig at home.

As it turns out, the Athlon X2 7750 is a fairly new processor that AMD quietly released last December and codenamed Kuma. A little digging around also revealed that it belongs to the newer Stars (K10) microarchitecture, the same one as the Phenom X3 and the Phenom X4. So while the Phenom X3 is a 4-core CPU with one core disabled, the X2 7750 is like an X4 with 2 cores disabled.

Following the logic above, AMD should ahve actually named the X2 7750 as the Phenom X2. As to why they did not follow that naming convention and went back as far as calling it an Athlon 64 X2 7750, I don’t really know. There were two other SKUs in this category — the X2 7550 @ 2.5GHz and the standard X2 7750 @ 2.7 GHz. The 7750 BE (Black Edition) also runs at 2.7GHz but has an  unlocked clock frequency multiplier which means this CPU is ready for overclocking out of the box (as all other Black Edition AMD CPUs have been).

Here’s a screenshot of the CPUZ report:

With a price point of Php4,000, the X2 7750 is lodged in the middle of older AMD CPUs like the X2 5200 (@2.7GHz), the X2 5600 (@2.9GHz) and the X2 6000 (@3.0). The big advantage it has, aside from the newer architecture, is the 3MB of total cache (512KB L2 per core and 2MB of shared L3 cache per chip) compared to the latter which only had 1MB.