A Look At AMD's Socket AM2 Platform

Test CPU: Athlon 64 X2 4800+ AM2

The processor we used for our tests was an Athlon 64 X2 4800+ for Socket AM2, which made its way to motherboard companies in mid-December 2005. It has the same technical characteristics as its Socket 939 brother: 2 x 1 MB L2 cache, and 2.4 GHz clock speed. However, while we could select DDR2-800 speed in the BIOS of the engineering test motherboard, it obviously did not set the memory faster than 667. As already mentioned, the memory is suspected to suffer from a performance bug, which may be true or simple a matter of the early product stage. The upcoming processor (revision F) will fix any of this; the dual core version is being shipped to motherboard partners starting this week, with single cores to follow in the middle of May.