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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Alouette Radeon - Wednesday, March 10, 2010 - link
I didn't want to believe it but you really ARE biased towards Intel! After all the harm they've caused in this industry how could you be? Do they threaten to stop sending you testing material if you don't sound like they're the second coming of Christ and AMD is just a second-rate company?computerfarmer - Monday, February 1, 2010 - link
Good article.Trying to find these to buy. AMD Athlon II x4 635 is the only one I have found available (newegg.ca). I live in Canada.
Are the rest of them expected soon?
th3rdpartynation - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 - link
I want to build a WHS and the 3 things I consider most important are Video Encoding performance, Low Power, and Price. That being said I have narrowed it down to Athlon II X4 vs Core i3. A matchup I would love to see would be an undervolted Athlon II X4 vs. an Overclocked Core i3. If not then maybe everybody could tell me which they recommend?blowfish - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 - link
for the video encoding part, that's easy enough - just check out "Bench", and factor in your underclocks and overclocks, since encoding scales fairly well with clock speed for a given cpu.Price is easy enough to figure out.
The i3's probably have the best power/performance.
jackylman - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
As a fan of silent computing, the 45W TDP quad-core 910e is the most exciting chip in this round, and I don't see it in the power consumption graphs. Disappointed.. :(MrSpadge - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 - link
You see in the charts that:- idle power isn't that much different between the AMDs
- at load they consume about their "ACP" (former TDP)
So if you're not running under load the choice doesn't matter. If you run under load you could take any of the current 45 nm CPUs and lower its ridiculously high stock voltage of 1.4 V to maybe 1.2 V at 2.6 GHz. That should get you to maybe 80 W instead of 65 W for the specially binned chips. Close enough I'd say. If it's still too loud: go to 2.5 GHz and lower the voltage again.
BTW: Core i3/5/7 can be even more energy efficient if you don't push them to 4 GHz.
leexgx - Sunday, January 31, 2010 - link
ACP that AMD use now not very helpful 95w/65w may had just be 125w/95w,the Athlon II are far better on heat output (X2 more so) then the Phenom II or the older hotcake 9xxx Phenoms (guessing most due to L3 cache)
mindless1 - Saturday, January 30, 2010 - link
... but for some purposes you have to look at an o'c system being more efficient, since CPU is only a fraction of total system power consumption and we are free to turn a system off when the tasks are completed.jackylman - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
errr 65WTaft12 - Wednesday, January 27, 2010 - link
If you are a supposed fan of silent computing, I'm surprised you aren't aware that you are better off buying a "standard" AMD CPU for much less and undervolting and underclocking to get even better results (ie. cooler and lower-power-consuming) than buying AMD's e-series (like MrSpadge describes).