Athlon II X2 220 is available is US

Last week Athlon II X2 220 OEM processors started to appear in US online stores. Cheapest prices for the CPU are currently in the range from $45 to $50 plus shipping. You may also get this processor from eBay for $54.99 with free shipping.

Dual-core Athlon II 220 operates at 2.8 GHz, i.e. at the same frequency as model 240, but has twice smaller size of level 2 cache. Compared to previous low-budget OEM only model 215, the 220 has 100 MHz faster core frequency, and newer C3 core stepping. We acquired one Athlon II X2 220 CPU, and ran various benchmarks on it. As expected, we found that performance of the processor is 2% - 3.5% higher than performance of the previous model, Athlon II 215. Further below we provided a few graphs that show how Athlon II X2 220 fared to other AMD and Intel dual-core CPUs. For benchmarks, we selected the following processors:

Processor	Socket	Frequency	L2 cache	L3 cache	TDP
Athlon II X2 215	socket AM3	2.7 GHz	1 MB	None	65 Watt
Athlon II X2 220	socket AM3	2.8 GHz	1 MB	None	65 Watt
Athlon II X2 235e	socket AM3	2.7 GHz	2 MB	None	45 Watt
Athlon II X2 240	socket AM3	2.8 GHz	2 MB	None	65 Watt
Celeron Dual-Core E3400	socket 775	2.6 GHz	1 MB	None	65 Watt
Pentium Dual-Core E6700	socket 775	3.2 GHz	2 MB	None	65 Watt
Pentium G6950	socket 1156	2.8 GHz	0.5 MB	3 MB	73 Watt

The benchmarks were ran on the following motherboards:

• Socket 1156 - ASUS P7P55D motherboard with 2 GB of dual-channel Corsair TR3X3G1600C9 DDR3 memory.
• Socket AM3 - ASRock M3A780GXH/128M motherboard with 2 GB of dual-channel Corsair CM3X1024-1333C9 DDR3 memory.
• Socket 775 - ASRock 4Core1600Twins-P35 with 2 GB of dual-channel Corsair CM3X1024-1333C9 DDR3.

For all tests we used 32-bit Windows XP, and the same type of hard disk drive and video card. All results in graphs below are provided as percentage values, relative to performance of Athlon II X2 220 CPU.

MySQL - selecting data

This graph is a good reflection of Athlon 220's integer performance in comparison with Intel processors - it's not as fast as top Pentium Dual-Core models, but it has better performance than the E3400, the fastest at this time Celeron Dual-Core CPU.

Part number		Result
Intel Pentium Dual-Core G6950		126.3%
Intel Pentium Dual-Core E6600		115.6%
AMD Athlon II X2 220		100%
Intel Celeron Dual-Core E3400		93.9%

Apache web server - static pages

Athlon 220 is still slower than Pentium G6950 and E6600 in Apache benchmark, and faster than the E3400, but the performance difference between processors is now greater. In this test, the G6950 has almost 40% better performance than the model 220, which in turn is 14% faster than the E3400.

Part number		Result
Intel Pentium Dual-Core G6950		139.8%
Intel Pentium Dual-Core E6600		117.8%
AMD Athlon II X2 220		100%
Intel Celeron Dual-Core E3400		86%

7Zip compressing/decompressing speed

7Zip benchmark is more dependent on memory bandwidth than MySQL and Apache tests, and this causes a notable change in benchmark results. Pentium G6950, which has smaller size of level 1 + level 2 caches than other CPUs in this test, is no longer the best. The 6950's large, but slow, 3 MB level 3 cache doesn't help much to improve the performance. This Pentium processor performs similarly bad in WinRAR benchmark, where it falls behind all Athlon II CPUs.

Performance of the Athlon 220 CPU in comparison with other Athlon II processors in the 7Zip test is quite predictable:

• It scores lower than similarly clocked Athlon II 240, owing to smaller L2 cache
• Having 100 MHz higher frequency, the 220 with 1 MB L2 cache is almost as good as Athlon II 235e with 2 MB L2 cache.
• The 220 is 3.1% faster than Athlon 215, which is consistent with its 3.7% higher core frequency.

Part number		Result
Intel Pentium Dual-Core E6600		107.3%
AMD Athlon II X2 240		103.8%
AMD Athlon II X2 235e		100.6%
AMD Athlon II X2 220		100%
Intel Pentium Dual-Core G6950		98.1%
AMD Athlon II X2 215 (rev. C2)		96.9%
Intel Celeron Dual-Core E3400		86.8%

wPrime v1.55 (32M)

wPrime floating-point benchmark results look similar to integer MySQl and Apache benchmarks. Large size of level 2 cache on Athlon II X2 235e and 240 processors doesn't result in increased performance for this test, and, consequentially, they perform as fast as Athlon II 215 and 220 CPUs respectively.

Part number		Result
Intel Pentium Dual-Core G6950		110.2%
Intel Pentium Dual-Core E6600		100.8%
AMD Athlon II X2 220		100%
AMD Athlon II X2 240		99.4%
AMD Athlon II X2 215 (rev. C2)		96.2%
AMD Athlon II X2 235e		96.1%
Intel Celeron Dual-Core E3400		85.3%

CINEBENCH R10 CPU score (Multithreaded)

Cinebench SIMD benchmark is not much different from integer benchmarks, except that Celeron E3400 now outruns all Athlon II CPUs. Better Celeron scores are possibly due to better SIMD performance on Celeron and Pentium CPUs, combined with better code optimization for Intel processors. Therefore the 28% - 35% lead of Pentium microprocessors in this test is more the exception, than the rule, and other benchmarks prove it.

Part number		Result
Intel Pentium Dual-Core E6600		135.1%
Intel Pentium Dual-Core G6950		128.9%
Intel Celeron Dual-Core E3400		106.9%
AMD Athlon II X2 240		103.9%
AMD Athlon II X2 235e		100.5%
AMD Athlon II X2 220		100%
AMD Athlon II X2 215 (rev. C2)		96.2%

H.264 video encoding - single process

Pentium processors in the h.264 video encoding test are still in the lead, but the difference is not as significant as in the Cinebench benchmark. Celeron E3400 takes the last place in this benchmark.

Part number		Result
Intel Pentium Dual-Core E6600		115%
Intel Pentium Dual-Core G6950		113.5%
AMD Athlon II X2 220		100%
Intel Celeron Dual-Core E3400		96.7%

For more detailed comparisons of Athlon II X2 220 CPU with other processors please see the following pages: Athlon II X2 215 vs 220
Athlon II X2 220 vs Celeron E3400
Athlon II X2 vs Pentium E6600

You may also visit Athlon II 220 CPU page (link is below), and use "Compare with..." feature on the "Specifications" tab to compare this processor with other CPUs from our database.