Amd "Kuma" processor we've all been waiting for has finally arrived as the latest edition to the "Stars" family: the 2.3GHz Athlon 6500. Expreview, who recently got their hands on one of the chips, is touting it to be AMD's "best dual core ever" after a benchmark test where it ranked highest in overall performance against the Brisbane 2.6MHz and 2.3MHz Athlon64 X2 5000+. The Kuma also held its own with overclocking, easily reaching 3GHz at default voltage, and hitting 3.4GHz with a voltage increase. A 20W higher power consumption was noted as the primary con, with conjectures that it might be an "Agena with two cores disabled." The 65nm chip offers HT3.0 support, DDR2-1066 support via an integrated controller, Cool'n'Quiet 2.0, a shared 2MB L3 cache, includes SSE4A support, and will retail for around $110 when it hits store shelves.
From our test result, you can see lots of improvements have been done compare to Brisbane core. Take benchmark tool PCMark Vantage as an example, we've experienced about 8% in total score increase. You can see more improvement in real game and video transcode software: a same MPG video clip transcode, Kuma only used 1min 37sec, but Brisbane need 2min 26sec to finish the job, very impressive.
In other words, Kuma is more better than other AMD dual core, not only the basic performance, the overclocking and memory ratio adjustment are also proved that the CPU is AMD's advancement in dual core arena.
Power consumption is one of con of Kuma. We don't know if Kuma is a Agena with two cores disabled, but it really feels like. In default clock Athlon 6500 is 300MHz lower than Athlon64 X2 5000+, but power consumption is 20W higher no matter idle or active.
It is still unclear that AMD will position the Kuma on which level. Till now we didn't see the product hit local market massively, only some E-tailers listed the Kuma CPU Athlon 6500. So if you got any info about the CPU's availability, please leave a comment here.
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