AMD computing products manufacturer has been doing anything they can to compete with Intel. In a recent effort, to wound Intel, AMD has released the Athlon II P320. Have they achieved their goal? What are the features that make this Athlon processor a good competitor for Intel? Let’s have a look at the characteristics of the AMD Athlon II P320.
In the first place we need to mention that this is a dual core processor that has been manufactured with Champlain architecture. The processing frequency of the cores is 2.1 GHz and it has a front side bus rate of 3200MHz. the cores have been manufactured with 45nm lithography technology and a thermal design power of 25 watts, which make the power consumption significantly less. Another good aspect of the AMD Athlon II P320 processor is that it comes with AMD64 technology, or commonly known as HyperTransport bus technology. This is a thumbs-up feature because thanks to this technology the data transfer of 64 bits is done in a more effective way because it does not require the presence of a chip. Another striking feature of the P320 is that it comes with a read/write total memory of 1 MB, and it also supports DDR3 memory type with a frequency of 1066 MHz. The Athlon II comes with a dual-channel of 533 MHz DDR3 SDRAM memory controller and a 1600MHz 16 bits HyperTransport link. This feature allows users to have a good performance when carrying out simple tasks. However, if you are planning to play 3D games or run demanding apps you will experience a laggard performance. Despite having two cores, the Athlon will not allow users to run more than three applications at the same time. However, it is important to mention that the Athlon II P320 comes with integrated Virtualization technology. This technology gives users the possibility of having several operating systems in the processor without experiencing a sluggish performance. The processor comes with two levels of cache, the first level size is 2x64KB for the instruction cache and 2x64KB for data cache, and the second level size is 2x512KB. Another feature AMD has decided to include in the Athlon II P320 is the Enhanced virus protection, which provides a better protection in case a virus enters your processor.
All in all, this processor will provide you with a decent performance if you do not intend to play demanding games.