14 DAY TRIAL // AMD seems to have turned the introduction of Phenom II parts without any L3 cache into a habit, as the company has recently added another such processor to its lineup, the Phenom II X2 521, which is right now available in a series of OEM systems.
This is the third Phenom II processor based on the dual-core version of the Propus architecture to be launched by AMD since the start of the year, the previous two being the X4 840 and the X2 511.
Before the introduction of these chips, all of the company's Phenom II processors used the Daneb design which includes 4MB of L3 cache memory.
However, this seems not to be the case anymore, as the Phenom II X2 521, just like the X2 511 launched before it, is actually an Athlon II part sold under the Phenom brand.
As far the specifications of the new processors are concerned, CPU-World states that these are identical with those of the Athlon II 275, which was supposed to be released in the first part of the current year.
This means that the Phenom II X2 521 sports dual processing cores that are clocked at 3.5GHz, 256KB of L1 and 2MB of L2 cache, support for the SSE3 instruction set, and a HyperTransport link which operates at 2GHz.
All these are fitted inside a 65W power envelope and the processor is based on the C3 revision of the Regor (dual-core Propus) core.
The Phenom II X2 521 is compatible with all AM3 motherboards, but it may require a BIOS update to be properly recognized.
The AMD chip was discovered in the specifications list of HP's Pavilion p7z desktop PC by one of CPU-World's readers and HP is also shipping this processor in the HP Pavilion p6823w. Right now, we don't know whether the chip will make it into the retail market or not.