In what will likely be the last series of dual-core processors to come from AMD’s desktop team, the Athlon 6500 is based on the Kuma core and runs at 2.3 GHz.  It is a 65nm CPU with HT3.0 support, it still uses a built-in DDR2 memory controller, shared 2M L3 cache, Cool”n’Quiet 2.0 and adds SSE4A support courtesy of other K10 processors.  Expreview apparently got their hands on one and posted up a review of sorts.  

AMD Athlon 6500 2.3 GHz Kuma Reviewed - Processors 2

From our test result, you can see lots of improvements have been done compare to Brisbane core. Take benchmark tool PCMark Vantage as an example, we’ve experienced about 8% in total score increase. You can see more improvement in real game and video transcode software: a same MPG video clip transcode, Kuma only used 1min 37sec, but Brisbane need 2min 26sec to finish the job, very impressive.

In other words, Kuma is more better than other AMD dual core, not only the basic performance, the overclocking and memory ratio adjustment are also proved that the CPU is AMD’s advancement in dual core arena.

Power consumption is one of con of Kuma. We don’t know if Kuma is a Agena with two cores disabled, but it really feels like. In default clock Athlon 6500 is 300MHz lower than Athlon64 X2 5000+, but power consumption is 20W higher no matter idle or active.

It is still unclear that AMD will position the Kuma on which level. Till now we didn’t see the product hit local market massively, only some E-tailers listed the Kuma CPU Athlon 6500. So if you got any info about the CPU’s availability, please leave a comment here.