AMD Processors

Low-End: Athlon X2 BE-2350

The Athlon X2 BE-2350 is priced under $100 and provides solid desktop performance at a rated thermal design point of only 45 W. Although Intel also has energy-efficient processors, the Core 2 Duo and Pentium Dual Core lineup is rated at a maximum of 65. In theory, the low-power AMD processor should have a significant advantage when operating with insufficient cooling.

The Athlon X2 BE-2350 runs at 2.1 GHz clock speed and has two 512 kB L2 caches. It is based on the current 65 nm DSL SOI process, which provides superbly low leakage currents. These processors utilize Socket AM2 at a 1 GHz link speed. Note that all Athlon 64 X2 processors are rated at 68 W or up, while this processor, though technically similar, is specified at only 45 W.