AMD is struggling to keep its market share from being completely overtaken by Intel by releasing yet another Athlon processor that comes with dual core architecture and a higher speed. Designed to keep fans from switching sides and for those that do not need the power of a true native quad core processor, the AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ is now presented is a Black Edition.

Some time ago, it was said that the Athlon 6000+ will be the last of its kind, but since AMD did not release the next generation of processors intended for desktop use, the Phenoms, the company tries to close the performance gap between its offerings and those from Intel by releasing yet another processor based on the dual core architecture. The AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ comes with a rather higher clock speed than other AMD products, reaching up to 3.2GHz, a clear 200MHz over the previous model. The 6400 processor is build using the 90 nanometer fabrication process and it comes with a single HyperTransport link clocked at 2.0GHz. As the CPU is a dual core, it has one megabyte of level two cache memory allocated for each processing core. The thermal envelope is 125W TDP, not much changed from the 6000+ processors.

The Athlon 6400+ is intended as a temporary solution to boost the performance of the high end AMD line of processors and it is targeted at competing with Intel's Core 2 Duo E6850 CPU, at least until the Phenoms hit the market. Pricing for the AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ Black Edition will be $239 for batches of 1000 pieces. This represents a 34 percent over the price tag of the 6000+ processor which costs $178. The 6400+ processor is offered as a PIB WOF Black Edition product, which means that the CPU comes in a nice black box but without heatsink or fan, and users will have to buy their own cooling solutions.

It is said the AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ Black Edition will be just under the Intel E6850 from the performance point of view, while being about 7 percent faster than its older brother, the 6000+ CPU. While the performance increase over the 6000+ CPU and the low price is good news for AMD's fans, the fact remains that the Black Edition processor still performs poorer that the Intel E6850 and it may not stop the gap in performance from growing.