Conclusion

Together with the transfer of all Athlon 64 processors to a new Venice core supporting SSE3 instructions and boasting higher frequency potential, AMD did the same thing to its Sempron processor family for Socket 754 systems. The budget Sempron processors acquire Revision E of the Palermo core, which also supports SSE3 instructions and enhanced memory controller, just like Venice. However, these Palermo core modifications do not cause any significant performance improvement. According to our tests, the performance advantage of the Sempron processors based on the new revision E of Palermo core over the predecessors is not higher than 1%.

However, the major advantages of the new core are different. Our investigation revealed that the new Palermo core boasts higher frequency potential compared with what CG and D core revisions of previous Sempron processors had. In particular, we managed to overclock our Sempron 3100+ processor on the new core up to the frequencies approaching 2.7GHz. As a result, the performance of this processor turned out beyond all our bravest expectations: overclocked Sempron 3100+ processor on the E core revision was running neck and neck with the top-end CPUs from Intel and AMD.

So, the relatively inexpensive Sempron processors on the new E core revision of Palermo will become even more desired by the economical overclockers. Processors like that are excellent basis for a high-performance system at a minimum cost.

However, there is still one fly in this ointment. Unfortunately, even with the new core the Sempron processors didn’t acquire AMD64 64-bit extensions support. This way Sempron processor family remains 32-bit only, which can be a pretty frustrating fact for some of the potential buyers.