[McG]

While I feel that the world should just move on towards quad-core processors myself, I also am faced with the reality that of course not everyone can afford them. And the one thing that we keep forgetting is that real value is still to be found in dual-core processors. The reality is that with normal everyday usage and gaming, a dual-core processor is really all you need. So AMD figured, what if you take a last generation Phenom X4 processor, shop it in half and release it? That is the what the Kuma architecture really is. AMD developed a new dual-core processor based on B3 revision/stepping, under codename Kuma. The Athlon X2 7850 CPU has a respective clock speed 2.8GHz, a processor with 3MB of total cache, 512KB of the L2 variety per core and 2MB of shared L3 cache per chip.

The Athlon X2 Series 7000 processors have a TDP (peak wattage) of 95W. Now that's by itself interesting as it's the same as the mid-range specced Phenom X3 and X4 processors. Now we should have two active & independent cores here, but I'm 99.99% certain that two other cores are to be found in there yet are disabled. This explains the transistor count and TDP. The performance of the 7850 Black Edition is unsurprisingly underwhelming compared to the 7750 Black Edition we looked at just four months ago. For a 100MHz speed bump, it offers no additional overclocking headroom because it's still the same 65nm B3 core, and so the limitations are still there.

Izvor: Guru3D i Bit-Tech