Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[mva5]

The latest 90um Sempron chips with the 754 socket perform very well, particularly when over-clocked. The larger cache and dual channels of the true 939 Athlon's don't seem to be that significant:

"Another appealing aspect of junior Sempron for Socket 754 models is their excellent overclockability. Our tests show that Semprons on the new 90nm Palermo core can add up about half their frequency at overclocking, to clock rates about 2.5GHz. For example, we managed to give our Sempron 2600+ a 56% frequency boost and the performance of the system subsequently grew by 35% in average and became comparable to that of systems with Pentium 4 3.4E and Athlon 64 3500+ processors."

"Summing up the results of these tests we should acknowledge that the reduction of the cache memory to 128 kilobytes in processors of K8 architecture doesn’t affect the performance too much. In our tests the processor with a 128KB L2 cache is in average only 1.2% slower than its analog with twice the size of the cache and less than 6% slower than the model with an L2 cache of the maximum size. Thus, you shouldn’t worry about the small amount of cache memory when choosing a Sempron for your Socket 754 system."

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/sempron-2600.html