AMD’s Sempron 140: An Entry Level CPU With Great Potential For Budget Users

Jonathan Lovelock | Nov 09, 2009 | View Comments

Ever Since Intel launched its ground breaking Core 2 Duo CPUs in the market, AMD is having a tough time making CPUs that can match their performance. Its first lot of Phenom CPUs were bugged with high power consumption issues and did not offer better performance than the Core 2 Duo CPUS. The Phenom II range proved to be an improved lot but the release of Intel’s next generation Core i7 CPUs again stole the spotlight. Now AMD is trying to offer something better in the budget range CPUs to take on the successful Intel Dual Core and Celeron CPUs. The release of its new Sempron 140 CPU corroborates this fact.

The Sempron CPU is single core and is pitted against Intel’s Celeron series of processors. However, AMD has made some significant changes in the Sempron series recently. The latest Sempron CPUs are based on the K10.5 architecture. Besides, they are all built on an improved 45nm process. Nowadays very few people use single core CPUs, but it would be wrong to mistake the Sempron 140 as a simple single core model from AMD. It has some serious overclocking and unlocking potential. These features are not widely known or officially supported, though.

The Sempron 140 is built on the same architecture used in AMD’s flagship Phenom II CPUs. This processor can be paired with the motherboards based on AM2+ socket. As an alternative one can also use them with newer AM3 socket based mainboards. Its integrated memory controller offers support for both DDR 2 and faster DDR3 memory. It would be useful for people who have DDR 2 RAM in stock.

The Sempron 140 has a default clock speed of 2.70 GHz. It is developed on the Sargas core with 1MB L2 Cache and 128KB L1 Cache. Its low power consumption of 45 W coupled with an attractive price tag of $39 is likely to attract the buyers with a tight budget. However, despite the absence of a second core and modest amount of L2 Cache, the Sempron 140 can perform most of the tasks thrown at it with aplomb. It runs silently and offers good performance when coupled with AMD’s 785G chip set based motherboards. In fact, it performs on par with the Celeron CPUs in gaming department. In gaming it definitely lags behind the faster Intel and Phenom CPUs but the casual gamers would be satisfied with its performance. However, it would not be a good idea to couple this processor with a high end graphics card as the card will get bottle necked.

It can take overclocking without much problem and in standard testing can be clocked over 3 GHz where it offers stable performance. Unlocking the disabled core in this CPU requires a person to have extensive knowledge of the BIOS and Overclocking. If the user can unlock the other core, it offers stellar dual core performance. Even with the single core, the Sempron 140 can be considered as a worthy candidate for a home based HTPC, Office PC or a client PC on LAN.

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