Here it is: AMD's Athlon 64 X2 dual core baby.

From a technical point of view, the Athlon 64 X2 is not far away from what we already know as the Athlon 64. It is based on AMD's latest 90 nm technology, and incorporates the improvements made to the San Diego and Venice single cores - containing 1 MB and 512 kB L2 cache respectively - that are hitting the market as you read this. In addition, all of these, including the dual core X2s, now support ISSE3.

The cores are connected via a crossbar that negotiates HyperTransport and memory controller access for both cores. AMD talks of a small performance impact when compared to a fully-featured dual processor system due to the crossbar. In our benchmarks, this impact seems to be rather negligible.

The three HyperTransport links are only valid for the Opteron - the Athlon 64 X2 comes with one HyperTransport to connect CPU and North bridge.

Socket 939 will remain AMD's premier choice until the beginning of 2006. At that time, socket M2 is planned to replace it.

CPU-Z 1.28 does not yet know the Athlon 64 X2 and lacks some information.