With Athlon X2 7850, AMD's Anniversary Reason For Celebration

Right on the heels of its recent Phenom II release and just in time for the company's 40th Anniversary, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) last week launched a new CPU that has the potential for big sales in this tough economy. <P> Selling at a low $69, the Athlon X2 7850 BE is a dual-core processor running at 2.8 GHz. Built on 65-nanometer architecture, the X2 7850 is based on the same Kuma core as previous 7000 series Athlons. <P> It makes a great entry-level processor with 512 KB of L2 data cache per core (1 MB total L2 per processor) and 2 MB of L3 Cache (shared). As with previous AMD processors, the BE in the naming convention stands for Black Edition. This is the company's way of designating unlocked multipliers. <P> What this essentially means is that users who want to try their hand at overclocking have a way to get their feet wet on a relatively inexpensive computer that can handle more than just Internet surfing and e-mail. <P> Along with the X2 7850, AMD also released a new Radeon HD 4770 GPU, which will sell for just under $100 after a $10 rebate. <P> With these latest announcements, a decent $300 to $400 PC can be built. Although the Athlon isn't going to break any records when compared to the latest CPU offerings from both AMD and Intel, a Black Edition system for around the same price as most Atom-based PCs is nothing to ignore.

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