Take a quick glance at the spec table and you’ll see that there have been some changes under the bonnet. The core of the FX-57 is the 90nm San Diego rather than the 130nm Clawhammer used for the FX-53 and FX-55, although you’ll also find some San Diego FX-55 processors on sale. San Diego is also used in the Athlon 64 3700+ and 4000+ models which have 1MB of L2 cache compared to the 512KB of the Venice core that is currently flavour of the month. Both Venice and San Diego use a silicon-on-insulator process and support the SSE3 instruction set. Intel has long led the way with SSE and while it seems to bring minimal benefit in the real world it can’t do AMD any harm to add this feature to its processors.