AMD Athlon II X4 620 & 630: The First $99 Quad Core CPU
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 16, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
PAR2 Multithreaded Archive Recovery Performance
Par2 is an application used for reconstructing downloaded archives. It can generate parity data from a given archive and later use it to recover the archive
Chuchusoft took the source code of par2cmdline 0.4 and parallelized it using Intel’s Threading Building Blocks 2.1. The result is a version of par2cmdline that can spawn multiple threads to repair par2 archives. For this test we took a 708MB archive, corrupted nearly 60MB of it, and used the multithreaded par2cmdline to recover it. The scores reported are the repair and recover time in seconds.
Par2 is healthily threaded so the Athlon II X4s continue to do well here. The Q8200 inches by the 620, but for all intents and purposes it's the same speed as the $99 fighter from AMD.
WinRAR - Archive Creation
Our WinRAR test simply takes 300MB of files and compresses them into a single RAR archive using the application's default settings. We're not doing anything exotic here, just looking at the impact of CPU performance on creating an archive:
The roles are reversed here, and all of the AMD architectures prove faster than their similarly priced Intel alternatives.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
150 Comments
View All Comments
The0ne - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
Whether you like to believe it or not, crippling or, in a nicer way, not release some of the features is pretty common in both software and hardware environments. Whether the decision was due to money, managerial ignorance, or a time-line it is still a feature that is not in the product that could be there.If you consider putting all features, which is impossible btw, then you run into issues where the consumer or market doesn't even need them. We have USBs, wireless, biometric security available in one of our product but 95% of the market could care less. They are still on serial lines and are uneducated on newer technologies. Most city halls are like this that is why you see plain old switching voting systems still in place and the occasional typewriter.
The0ne - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
You mean like the I5?andrenb91 - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
it's just a cpu...I'll buy it when I need it, my amd athlon 4850e and intel pentium dual-core e5200 still good enoughMrCommunistGen - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
Anyone know where you can get these? If not yet available, then when? I have a friend who needs a new computer, and the AII X4 620 would be a pretty good fit for him. I was somewhat grudgingly recommending the Ph II X2 550, but the X4 620 seems to offer much more balanced performance.pervisanathema - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
These results are meaningless. The intel CPUs should be forced to run 24x7 at their highest possible turbo speed. To do otherwise let's AMD lose by a smaller margin.i'm going to stay here saying the same until hell freezes.
i'm not going to accept under clocked results presented as if they were stock results.
this is a casus belli.
i mean it.
fitten - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
Heh... I see what you did there ;) I'm with you!johnsonx - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
lolClownPuncher - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
I see what you did there! Nice jobExar3342 - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
For $50 more, you get a much more energy efficient and faster processor. I would only recommend this quad to those with a MB that supports it, they need an upgrade, and they don't have much cash.AMD can't be making much money off these processors...
bji - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
"For $50 more" means "for 50% more" in this case. It's kind of ridiculous to talk about the difference of $50 in this context as if it's trivial. Those costs are not remotely comparable, so the implication that you might as well just spend $50 more to get the faster/more efficient processor is not justified by your statements.I personally always do target $150 for a processor price when building a new system - this is a habit I got into with my very first build, using a Pentium 100 which at the time cost $150. This means that a $200 processor which has better performance is not even in the realm of consideration for me, even though it is "only $50 more", which in this case, is an even smaller percentage increase than in the case you are talking about.
Just in case I haven't made my point abundantly clear: you can't recommend spending $50 more for someone who has budgeted $100 for the processor. You have to compare similarly priced CPUs. I would like to see more comparisons with the Phenom II 550 BE for that reason.