AMD Athlon II X2 & Phenom II X2 vs Intel E6300

The Athlon II X2, to be specific, is a 45nm monolithic dual-core processor. While the most recent Athlon X2s are derivatives of the original Phenom architecture, the Athlon II is based on the new and improved Phenom II architecture. Take two Phenom II cores, increase their L2 caches to 1MB, leave out the L3 and you’ve got an Athlon II. The entire die measures only 117.5 mm^2 and is made up of a meager 234 million transistors.