X-bit labs

A Secret Disclosed: AMD Sempron 3000+ for Socket 939 Review (page 2)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 10/12/2005 | 09:43 AM ]

AMD Sempron 3000+ for Socket 939

The sample we bought had a rating of 3000+. It looks exactly like an Athlon 64, if you don’t read the marking. But the marking does tell us that it is a Sempron for Socket 939 rather than an Athlon 64.

AMD’s website is as yet silent about the existence of any Sempron for Socket 939 processors, so we have to decipher the marking string of our sample of the CPU (SDA3000DIO2BP) by ourselves:

The characteristics listed in the table above tell you quite clearly that the Socket 939 Sempron is nothing else but a Venice-core Athlon 64 with a cut-down L2 cache. This comes from the fact, for example, that having an E3 stepping core, our Sempron supports AMD64 technology which has just recently appeared in Socket 754 processors (Socket 939 Semprons, on the contrary, always supported this technology). The reviewed processor is also close to the Athlon 64 in having a dual-channel memory controller and a 1GHz HyperTransport bus.