Most of the news out of AMD lately has been out of ATI with their video cards lately and most new attention is focused on Phenom II which should be coming out very soon from AMD. But AMD is also launching a new CPU series codenamed Kuma. This is a Stars core with a 2MB L3 cache and the Hypertransport bus runs at 1.8Ghz instead of 1GHz of most dual cores. We don't have a lot more technical information on the processor at this time but we'll update this review when we get more. For now here's what you probably care about: benchmarks and overclocking.

Here's our test system.

Windows Vista x86 SP1 was our test system with ATI Catalyst 8.12 drivers. The only vanilla X2 we had on hand was the X2 5000+ which runs at 2.6GHz so we down clocked our 7750 to 2.6GHz from 2.7GHz. Usually this is fairly accurate representation of what a processor with that stock clock would perform at though occasionally it is faster.

3DMark shows a good performance increase from the CPU which probably benefits heavily from the L3 cache on the Kuma processor.

We definitely weren't maxing out our Radeon 4850 at medium settings on DX9 with Crysis to lean the balance towards the CPU and it pays off in Crysis gaining 7fps over an X2 5000+.

Cinebench 10 isn't a huge difference but you do shave 13 seconds from rendering.