AMD's New Year Refresh: Athlon II X4 635, Phenom II X2 555, Athlon II X2 255 & Athlon II X3 440
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 25, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words
Admittedly it's not the most exciting of launches. Simple speed boosts never are. But that does not detract from the value that AMD is delivering here. The Athlon II X4 line continues to be unrivaled in terms of delivering multithreaded performance in an affordable package. The $99 Athlon II X4 630 and $119 Athlon II X4 635 are great values if you're doing a lot of video encoding or any other heavily threaded task. You may even be able to find some great deals on 620s now that they're priced out of the lineup.
The Athlon II X3 440 can be just as powerful of a sell, once again depending on your workload. Priced at $84 it's going to be better in well threaded workloads than the equivalently priced Intel dual-core. The Pentium G6950 sells for $99, runs at 2.8GHz and could potentially spoil AMD's fun here. Luckily for AMD, Intel disables HT on the Pentium G6950 and thus it's only a two core, two thread chip. We'll have to wait and see how that performs once we get a chip in house.
The new dual-core CPUs are competitive, but they don't dominate. The Phenom II X2 555 BE is priced too close to the Core i3 530 to make sense. The Athlon II X2 255 does well against the Pentium E6300 and has a much stronger upgrade path than anything that sits in the LGA-775 socket. Throughout 2010 Intel won't bring LGA-1156 into the sub-$80 price segment, so AMD has the ability to use Phenom II and Athlon II to compete with older Core 2 based designs there.
And there you have it. Things rarely change with a launch that's just a speed bump.
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mindless1 - Saturday, January 30, 2010 - link
Not necessarily, some e-series run any given frequency at a lower voltage, so by the same token whatever a non-e can do undervolted, an e- might do a bit higher speed at same voltage.Further, not all boards allow undervolting much, if at all, especially when you're trying to build a very small system. Big system with full mATX or ATX board with full o'c features, and silent fans is something just about any Tom, Dick, and Harry can build with no need to pick an e-series or undervolt a regular CPU.
play2learn - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
Not everybody have up to date CPU:s. Anand, it would be fun if you sneak in an old processor like pentium 3, 4 or Pentium D next time.Taft12 - Wednesday, January 27, 2010 - link
Anand did just that back in when Phenom II X2 and Athlon II X2 were released:http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...">http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...
It was an embarrassment, no self-respecting hardware geek should be using that crap when the cheapest CPU and motherboard on the market today buries that stone-age technology.
mindless1 - Saturday, January 30, 2010 - link
... but to many geeks, it's the love of tech, not the ePenis you claim by virtue of your system performance.I mean really, there is a point where even a geek takes a sensible position about what is appropriate for the work or play they actually do. Would you be amazed to know I still have a Celeron 500MHz fileserver running? The geek in me made it right in the first place including beefed up mobo capacitors, very open heatsink that takes years to get appreciable dust in it, filtered intake/positive pressure, and a few others things faster, but inferior for the purpose, systems have today.
mindless1 - Saturday, January 30, 2010 - link
lol, meant ... DON'T usually have today.play2learn - Thursday, January 28, 2010 - link
You have a point there. But then there are people like me that's still not satisfied with today's technology and just sit and wait and wait for that ultimate experience to show up. If you want me to buy a new system today (which is not going to happen) I need to be humiliated more than once.ssj4Gogeta - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
Won't it skew the graphs (eg. a bar too long to fit or a bar too small to be visible)NJoy - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
Sure it would. Last week just out of curiosity I decided to run CinebenchR10 on a Dell Precision with dual Xeons (PD 3Ghz based, 4 threads) against C2D E8400. Guest what? Over 4 minutes for Xeons whilst about 2:20 for C2D. Humiliation...mattscottshea - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
These are assumptions made by current naming standards. However, if these were to hold true, it would be quite a coup by AMD as there current unreleased top of the line 975 will run at 3.6GHz with 4 cores at 140W using the C3 stepping.AMD Phenom II X6 1075T 3.6GHz 6 cores / 125W (D1 stepping?)
AMD Phenom II X6 1055T 3.2GHz 6 cores / 95W
AMD Phenom II X6 1035T 2.9GHz 6 cores / 95W
AMD Phenom II X4 960T 3.3GHz 4 cores / 95W
MrSpadge - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
LOL. Naming conventions are there to lure people into buying just when you break the convention (*looking at the greenteam*)Anyway, their process has not magically changed - otherwise todays CPUs would be more energy efficient. And a new stepping is not going to turn the world upside down.. maybe a gain of 5% power at similar settings and a slightly higher clock speed at similar power levels.
And today you're getting 4 cores at 3.4 GHz for 140 / 125W. They'll be lucky and need heavy speed binning to get 3 GHz at 140W for the best 6-core CPU.