AMD’s best Dual core ever?! Athlon 6500 (Kuma) review
Oct 15 UPDATE: Kuma to become Athlon X2 7550 and 7750. More here.
Kuma is the first (or last) dual core 65nm CPU in “Stars” family. Early in 2007 Kuma showed up in AMD roadmap. But after September AMD had made their decision that they would launch Phenom 8000 series Triple core, Because of marketing, Kuma delayed to 2008 Q2.
It is interesting that AMD branded Kuma with “Athlon”, not Athlon64 X2 or Phenom X2. Initially Kuma have two SKU, they were 6050 and 6250. Both SKU would be positioned higher than Athlon64 X2.
But because of TLB issue, AMD’s CPU product line turned out to be a mass. Kuma once again delayed. Until recently some words mentioned that AMD finally make up their mind, going to release Kuma with new SKU๏ผ6500(2.3GHz)/6400(2.2GHz)/6300(2.1GHz). The CPU in our hand is the highest one, Athlon 6500.
Different from “cities” family, AMD starts their new code naming scheme in Phenom generation. Kuma is the eye of Dragon if you did some search with google. Kuma is a dual core CPU, everything is the same with Phenom X4(Agena)/X3(Toliman) except the number of cores. It is a 65nm CPU with HT3.0 support, its built-in DDR2 memory controller supports DDR2-1066, shared 2M L3 cache, Cool’n'Quiet 2.0. Like other K10 CPU, Kuma has SSE4A instruction support.
September 24th, 2008 at 2:16 am
Much faster than the older Athlons, but what’s up with the power consumption? Shouldn’t the TDP be more like 65w? The X3 and X4s at the same clock are 95w and 125w respectively. Do disabled cores consume power?(Sorry I’m a newbie)
September 24th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
My goodness… looks like you guys need an editor to clean up those closing statements…
September 24th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
YES! Way to go AMD, that’s what you need to do to get out of that huge hole you dugg yourself into. Release new dual-core processors, which overclock well(1GHz OC on AIR!? Get me one please!), increase performance in gaming(which it does) and reduce video encoding time(which it does as well).
For once, I’m proud to say: Well done AMD, you’re finally doing something right.
September 24th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
can we see some benchmarks when its OC plz,
nice review but, looking like a nice chip there
September 24th, 2008 at 5:43 pm
@bob
seriously dude, if you are reading expreview for their English proficiency, then you are reading them for the wrong reason. These guys give us tech news man ahead of the world most of the time, not English lessons.
@Jeff
Good job man. Thanks a lot. But you know what is the most interesting thing? A review against dual core Core2s at the same Mhz. And i mean both available Core2s at 65nm and 45nm.
September 24th, 2008 at 6:11 pm
Agreed. Why not just forget about the spelling errors? The point is u can understand it and get informed of the latest news you need.
September 24th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
Wait, I checked newegg and it says 95w for both the X3 and X4 versions. That’s weird. If it’s priced at 110+ dollars like I’ve been reading, that’d make it the same price as an X3 at the same clock. I hope it’s cheaper than that.
September 24th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
Keep in mind that he translate from the chinese version of expreview, so I can forgive him for the spelling, although it wouldn’t be so hard to just copy/paste into Word and fix most spelling and grammar errors that way.
I’m pretty sure that his prices ar based on the chinese retail prices too, we’l see more realistic prices when the launch gets closer to us.
September 24th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
10/10/2008 is a possible release date?
http://www.shopblt.com/cgi-bin/shop/shop.cgi?action=thispage&thispage=011003000501_BU34403P.shtml&order_id=!ORDERID!
September 24th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
Nice review pal…
September 24th, 2008 at 11:35 pm
Nice CPU, I wonder the price what it will be looking at the current prices for the X4’s these dual core is replacing what single core was in a 1 - 2 years
September 25th, 2008 at 3:33 am
Hi Jeff, I’d really appreciate if you could compare the Athlon64 X2 6400+ (3200 MHz) with the overclocked Athlon 6500 Kuma (on 3200 MHz as well), which seems to be the stable maximum for this processor. This would give us a few insights on how efficient the Phenom technology really is in a clock-by-clock comparison.
September 25th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
Lol, if there is a BE maby 3,00 - 3,20 Ghz are easy possible with the multyplier. This mean 25% encreasing perfomance at least!!! Lol If the price is good plus one ATI 4870 Crysis and STALKER will run on HIGH.
September 25th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
Yeah! X2 6400+ vs 3,2ghz Kuma would be really neat!
September 25th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
9950BE 125W is allready cheap and if you want lower TDP get an Athlon X2 5050e 2,6Ghz 45W. My sauces told that AMD is working on technology that allows multiple cores to work on single thread, it should boost performance in applications which don’t take advantage over multicore CPUs.
September 25th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
I’d like to see Kuma OC’ed stats too if you guys have time.
September 25th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
I certainly want to see how it performs compared with Phenom X4 2000550
September 25th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
Rip the IHS off the top and “lo and behold” … a Phenom quad core with two cores disabled ….
September 25th, 2008 at 8:04 pm
I cannot think of a bigger mistake than not having their new CPUs with both DDR2 and DDR3 memory controllers on them. Remember how many customers they lost during the 939/AM2 switchover?
But alas, they probably can’t afford it…
September 25th, 2008 at 10:18 pm
Let me state for the record that I’ve been an AMD customer and supporter since the K5 series. Last year, after my Athlon64 (Socket 939) machine died, I quickly needed to build a replacement. Intel had just dropped the prices on the Core 2 lines, at which point they had the better price/performance ratio going for them. I didn’t have time to wait another week or two for AMD to drop their prices, so I went with Intel.
To make a long story shorter, I bought a Core 2 Duo 6320 after reading several articles lauding its ability to overclock. My stock 1.8GHz CPU is running at 2.8GHz using the stock Intel retail cooler, with an idle temp increase of around 3-5 degrees C.
I was one of the many that felt betrayed by the death of 939 when 754 stuck around, but I’m open to going back to AMD, provided that the price/performance ration is right. That having been said, I’m glad to see that AMD is serious about getting back into the performance game. I just hope that this is enough to make them a real player again.
September 26th, 2008 at 12:03 am
This will be interesting if AMD can ramp up their cpus speed, which it seem that they can if we go with that overclock. Bring a 3.2GHz Kuma to the market and I think that AMD will finaly have something to fight agaisnt the E8xxx lineup of Intel in the performance dual-core market segment.
In any case, if this can bring competition to Intel and lower prices, I’m all for it!
September 26th, 2008 at 5:36 am
It would be interesting if you compared to the cheapest AMD tricore processor or something correspondent. If you could get an Intel processor that let us know what this CPU can be compared to. Great work!
September 26th, 2008 at 8:50 am
Good. The price is … Will buy one to play spore! http://yobeta.com/
September 26th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
An extremely comprehensive review…
September 26th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
My Brisbane core Athlon 64 x 2 has the same incorrect temp readings. I get 9C and 6C from every program I use. This isn’t an incompatibility with bleeding edge software as it is just a badly calibrated probe on AMD’s part. Makes overclocking feel a bit more like stabs in the dark, I’ll tell you that…
September 26th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
This will be interesting if AMD can reduce their multipliers and ramp FSB
September 29th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
i think even E5200 it cannot compete… keep chase up to the market again..
the first batch E5200 can simply done to go 3.6Ghz with stock vcore.
so, amd need to push more.
October 4th, 2008 at 5:11 pm
I think that a comparison between a 3.00 GHz Kuma and a 3.00 GHZ E8400 would be appropriate, although maybe somehow bold. Also against an E5200 overcloked to 3 GHz (probably with a similar price).
October 5th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
How does this compare to the upcoming Intel Core i7 920? Check the test at http://yobeta.com
October 5th, 2008 at 11:44 pm
the athlon 6500+athlon x2 black edition kuma cpu is a dual core with great potential.
it only cost you 85 euro same as 6000+ great isn’t it?
it runs at 2,3GHZ and yet it can outpreform its 6000+ 90nm brother in certain cases.
also its cores are way smaller and it has more cache. imagine if you put this guy to a 3,4ghz and beyond
if i wasn’t saving money for 2nQ 2009 to buy a new computer i would probretly build one with this CPU. awell its no problem at all hehe. by then the RV870 should be out and 45nm phenoms should have sb800 motherboards. ddr3 support and much higher clocks
October 7th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Nice but only for peoples whit MoBo Phenom support can get advantage
They start to sold it in Europe:
http://www.appinformatica.com (for Spain).