Curious how AMD's new AM1 platform APUs compare to the original AMD Phenom processors? Wondering myself, I ran some tests showing how the Sempron 2650 and 3850 along with the Athlon 5150 and 5350 compare to the original Phenom 9500 and Phenom II X3 710 processors with RS780/RS880 motherboards. Besides the new APUs being competitive against the old hardware while costing much less than the original Phenom CPUs, their power consumption is also at a fraction of AMD's former high-end processors. Here's a brief but nice look at AMD's processing evolution in going from Phenom CPUs to today's AMD budget APUs.

The Phenom 9500 (Agena) was one of AMD's original quad-core Phenoms and came clocked at 2.2GHz with a 95 Watt TDP and was introduced in late 2007. Meanwhile, the Phenom II X3 710 (Heka) came in 2009 and was a 2.6GHz processor with a 95 Watt TDP. It should be fairly interesting to see how these former high-end AMD CPUs compare to today's ultra-budget APUs. The top-end AM1 APU, the Athlon 5350, costs just about $55 USD and has a 25 Watt TDP.