Yesterday, on the 6th September, AMD announced the launch of the latest member of its dual-core Athlon 64 X2 family however information about the 5200+ was limited to the tray price – US$403 per 1,000 – with no mention of the clock speed, TDP, cache, Socket and so on.
Now that AMD has revised its website two things have become clear. First the X2 5200+ is little more than an X2 5000+ with 2MB of L2 cache so it runs at the same 2.6GHz clock speed and uses Socket AM2. This smacks of desperation as AMD only recently tidied up its range to get rid of the 2MB L2 models but the really interesting aspect of the changes is that AMD has positively slashed the prices of its desktop processors.