Well from what I seen there is no diff between these two cores other then the fact that the San Diego core starts out at 3500+ with 1mb L2 cache and the Venice core starts out at 3000+ with 512kb L2 cache.

Now as far as pricing the two cores at the same speed, there isn't much diff in price either.

Athlon 64 San Diego core 3500+ 1mb L2 cache $369.00

Athlon 64 Venice core 3500+ 512kb L2 cache $287.00

So basically you are paying 80 more dollars for the extra 512kb of L2 cache on the San Diego core running at the same speed as the Venice core.

Bottom line.

Venice - Is the value mainstream single core for the Athlon 64.

San Diego - Is the high-end mainstream single core for the Athlon 64.

I have heard rumors that the Venice is actually a defective San Diego, but I haven't seen any proof of this yet. I personally would go with the San Diego since the price difference is less than $100.

BENCHADDIX

Well I prefer the San Diego just because of the 1mb L2 cache on it and that 1mb cache does come in handy with encoding and burning etc... Not to mention bigger cache will help more in 64bit mode. 1 mb of L2 cache may not help all the much in 32bit mode vs 512kb of L2 cache but in 64 bit mode it's a whole other story. Xbit did test on Athlons 64's that had 512kb of L2 cache and Athlon 64's that had 1mb of L2 cache at the same clockspeed in 32bit and 64bit mode and the AMD 64 that had 1mb of L2 cache in 64 bit mode had a nice lead on certain apps compared to the AMD 64 that had 512kb of L2 cache. So there isn't much diff of cache size in 32bit mode but there is a diff in cache size in 64bit mode.

the San Diego is only available on the 3700+
Roger