What’s New in New Semprons?

The main distinguishing trait of the new Semprons for Socket 754 is that they are all based on the new core, called Palermo. The Palermo is a derivative from the Winchester core, with a reduced L2 cache and disabled AMD64 technology. That is, the new Sempron 2600+, 2800+ and 3000+ for Socket 754 are manufactured with 90nm tech process, but are based on the stepping D0 core, so they don’t yet support the SSE3 instruction set.

The Sempron 3100+ model, which has been marketed for long already, is also being transferred to the Palermo core, but the older, 130nm samples are still more common in shops.

Quite reasonably AMD didn’t reduce the frequency of the new Sempron 2600+, 2800+ and 3000+ too much, which would have made them perform slower than the Sempron for Socket A of the same ratings. So they dropped the performance not only by reducing the clock rate, but also by truncating the L2 cache. That is, some of the new Sempron models have a smaller L2 cache (128KB, to be exact) than the Sempron 3100+ has (i.e. 256KB).

The following table lists the characteristics of the old and new Sempron processors for Socket 754. All processors of that type available today are listed:

Thus, Sempron processors for Socket 754 work at lower frequencies and have less L2 cache memory than the more expensive Athlon 64 models. The Semprons don’t also support the 64-bit extensions, but do support the NX bit.