Obscure CPUs: Athlon II X2 B30 and Phenom II X2 B60

With the launch of 32nm desktop AMD budget and high-performance microprocessors in July and September of this year, older 45 nm chips are getting end-of-lifed. Majority of consumer-class Athlon II, Phenom II and Sempron CPUs are already retired, or will be retired next month. The only exception to this are Bxx business-class processors, many of which can be ordered until the middle of the next year. After all, longevity is one of the features of business-class platform, which makes these CPUs attractive to OEM manufactures. In the past, we had a few stories about Bxx products. Out last reports, published in December 2010 and February 2011, featured Athlon II X2 B28, Phenom II X2 B59 and Phenom II X4 B99 processors. We recently found that AMD produced even faster X2 business class CPUs: Athlon II B30 and Phenom II B60. Both parts were found in specifications of HP Pro 3335 PC. They can also be ordered in HP Compaq 6005 Pro microtower PC:

So far we presumed that the fastest Athlon II business class processor was model B28. That CPU was clocked at 3.4 GHz, and had standard features of "Regor" core, i.e. two cores with 1 MB L2 cache per each core, on-chip DDR3 memory controller, and support for SSE3, AMD64 and Virtualization features. The B28 was almost identical to Athlon II 270 consumer CPU, that appeared in OEM PCs in second quarter 2011, and was sold as a boxed processor in the second half of the year. It was rumored that there will be faster version of 270, Athlon II X2 275, but it never realized. Athlon II X2 B30, on the other hand, was shipped in HP computers, and some chips made it to Chinese Taobao online marketplace. Athlon X2 B30 has increased to 3.6 GHz clock speed, and in other aspects it is not different from the B28.

Phenom II B60 has two CPU cores, and operates at 3.5 GHz frequency. This is on a par with Phenom II X2 570 CPU, that was launched in May and never made it to retail. The B60 comes with 512 KB level 2 cache per each core, and it boasts large shared 6 MB level 3 cache. The processor supports the same technologies as Athlon II B30 and Phenom II 570, however some B60 CPU features are different. Specifically, B60 is limited to DDR3-1066 memory, and it has higher 2.2 GHz HyperTransport link frequency.

Introduction date of both models is not known. The last order date for the microprocessors will be around June 2012.