No offence but do you know what average means?
Think your having a hardtime knowing what anything means unless its about the 550
And about the 550, 3.8ghz is low end of the ''average'' for 550's as well. I've seen reviews of 4.2 on air.
Lets face the fact, For AMD to release a Dual Core Phenom II with a Dual Core Athlon II too, means the Phenom II X2 were the bottom of the barrel of the Quad cores. If they were that good they could make more profit on them as a X3. There was no other reason to cut off two of the cores when they already had the Athlon II with more cores on a wafer to make a profit.
Dont it just make alot of sense if you have a Quad that can do 4ghz. stable with normal voltage that could sell as a X4 965 for over 200 bucks, to kill 2 cores and sell them for 100 bucks
And on top of that it could have been a X3 for 20 bucks more plus you already have a Athlon II.
And yes of course some 550's don't unlock, it was just a bonus. But for this discussion lets stick with the 550 being a dual core only.
Lets do that.
If you look at single threading benchmarks, the 550 beats the 720 clock for clock. In gaming, you will never ever notice a difference between a 720 and 550 at the same clock speeds.
Its amazing you only look at benchmarks that favor the 550 in single threaded programs. And your clock for clock thing, at the same clock they are the same performance core for core plus the 710/720 has a extra core. Both the 550 and 720 have the same core so both clocked at 3ghz. would perform the same in single threaded and in multi threaded the 720 would have a advantage. Hell in multi threaded and overclocked it even beats some quad cores.
The 550/710 is not worth the money when you have a 720 for 20 bucks more or a 245 for 30 bucks less. Its just AMD getting rid of there low yield/buggie quads.
The Phenom II X3 was released to compete against the Core 2 till they got the Athlon II out the door. The Phenom II X2 is just getting rid of the bugged quads.
If AMD already has a Phenom II X3 and X4, plus now a Athlon II. What do you think they wanted the Phenom II X2 for.
1. Lets lose some money for the hell of it and kill 2 of the Phenom II cores, we already have the Athlon II now but who cares.
or
2. How can we get rid of all these low yield quads.
However, we didn’t get any significantly different results when we increased the core voltage by 0.175V (to 1.5V). The CPU worked stably at 3.9GHz, which is as good as it gets.
Note that since Athlon II X2 250 doesn’t belong to the Black Edition family, we had to increase the clock generator frequency to 260MHz to achieve these results. This is where the absence of any L3 cache came in very handy: Athlon II X2 250 didn’t mind speeding up its integrated North Bridge and we didn’t have to lower the corresponding multiplier. As a result, its frequency increased to 2.6GHz, which was no big deal for it as long as we slightly increased its voltage (by 0.1V).
So, ((Athlon II X2 250 proved to be a little more overclocking-friendly than its elder brother, Phenom II X2 550)), even though it is not one of those Black Edition units. Of course, it is way too early to make any final conclusions about the new processors’ overclocking potential judging only by the results obtained on the very first samples. But at this point it looks like Regor core boasts slightly better frequency potential than Deneb and its modifications called Heka and Callisto
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/phenom-athlon-ii-x2_13.html#sect0
