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Earlier this last month, AMD launched for its 40 years of existence the 2.8GHz Athlon Kuma 7850 Black Edition, the last of the Athlon series, which also celebrated its 10 years. Today, we are presented to its son: the Athlon II X2 250. It is the first of that new series and is clocked at an healthy 3Ghz.

This baby was born by applying all the tweaks that the Phenom series received to the existing Athlon dual-core architecture. However, compared to the Athlon Kuma, it does not feature L3 cache but has a full 1MB of L2 cache per core instead of 512kB on current Phenom IIs, for a total of 2MB.

The other big difference is that it does not features an unlocked multiplier. From now on, the Black Edition versions will be reserved to the Phenom II series. This means there will be no unlocked Athlon II. Furthermore, like the previous AM3 processors, the processor's PCB is dark green. Note that in this comparison picture, there seems to be a lot less gold than on the previous processor. It is simply because the larger bases of the pins, which cover most of the pins area from above, are not plated.

This processor retails for a mere $87 which, in this price range, makes it compete against the 2.8GHz E6300 and 2.7GHz E5400, priced at $82 and $90, respectively. These 45nm Pentium dual-cores should be no challenge for the Athlon II X2 250, which sports the same 65W TDP as them.

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