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A rare hardware thread, still worth mentioning. The price of quad-cores has reached double digits. Article/review by Anand Himself.

AMD Athlon II X4 620 & 630: The First $99 Quad Core CPU

How does AMD respond to Lynnfield? Is it by drastically cutting prices on Phenom II? Nope. By introducing the world’s first quad-core processor to debut at $99. Now that’s cool.

It’s called the Athlon II X4 and its existence shouldn’t be any surprise. AMD quietly announced it along with the Athlon II X2 line.

Today we get two models: the Athlon II X4 630 and the Athlon II X4 620, priced at $122 and $99 respectively. The only difference between the two is clock speed; the 630 runs at 2.8GHz while the 620 runs at 2.6GHz. These are both AM3 chips meaning they'll work in AM3 motherboards with DDR3 memory or AM2+ boards with DDR2 memory.

^Word to NC.^

The price is unbeatable. If we ignore the 630 for a moment, the Athlon II X4 620 is by far the cheapest route to four cores on the market. Intel’s most affordable quad-core is the Core 2 Quad Q8200 at $163, while AMD would previously charge you $163 for a Phenom X4 9600B. This is where the AM3/AM2+ compatibility play really helps out. Motherboard/memory costs are as cheap as possible thanks to AMD's incredible socket flexibility.

And just in case you’re wondering, yes, the Athlon II X4 620 actually delivers performance competitive with the Q8200 but for 60% of the cost. It’s not all that clear cut, there are some cases where the 620 is faster but others where the Q8200 is much faster. On average it ends up being a wash but you’ll want to pay attention to the coming pages to see how the cookie crumbles as it does vary from test to test.
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Final Words
Regardless of what it may seem like, this is not a repeat of AMD during the late K8 or during the Phenom days. AMD is relegated to competing in the sub-$200 space, it is actually very competitive in that space. These days, I'm sure that's not a bad position to be in. While I'm sure AMD would love to be able to demand more money for its processors, being able to demand any at all isn't a bad position to be in.

AMD effectively knocked 40% off the value of Intel's low end quad-core CPUs. The Athlon II X4 620 manages to, at $99, perform close enough to the Core 2 Quad Q8200 that the latter simply doesn't make any sense. Add another hundred dollars and you'll get a Core i5 750 (or less will get you into a Phenom II X4 945/955), but if you're on a strict budget you can't beat the 620.

No L3, light on L2 at 512k/core... but the stock 2.6GHz OCed easily to 3.25 at stock voltage w_stock cooler. Wish I had a suitable mobo. {sniff}

Pocket rocket.  http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/sh … spx?i=3638

Last edited by Bat (2009-09-17 6:23 pm)