High-End: Athlon 64 X2 6000+

We picked AMD's Athlon 64 X2 6000+ as the high-end processor for our project. Although there is also the 6400+ Black Edition, it does not provide clearly more performance (3.2 GHz instead of 3.0 GHz) and AMD did not even sample this product. As you will see in the test results section, it would not even have made a difference. The 6000+ is available at TDP ratings of 125 W and 89 W; ours is a 125 W part. All models have two 1 MB L2 caches, and they're based on the aged 90 nm SOI process instead of the newer 65 nm one.