AMD's Fall Refresh: New Phenom II and Athlon II CPUs Balance Price and Performance
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 21, 2010 2:52 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Phenom II X6
- Athlon II
Final Words
Remaining relevant is something AMD has done a good job of with its Athlon II and Phenom II lines. Without a major redesign, AMD has managed to squeeze a reasonable amount of performance out of the Phenom II architecture. Pricing is what makes this all work. By being more aggressive on the pricing front than Intel, AMD is able to actually pull off some unquestionable wins.
The Athlon II X4 645 consistently does better than its dual-core competition and if you give up a little bit of clock speed you can even get the CPU down to the $100 mark with the Athlon II X4 640. The same is true for the Athlon II X3 450. At $87 there's simply nothing in Intel's lineup that can come close in most tests.
The dual core offerings are less interesting as you don't save a ton of money and lose the core-count advantage that the X4 and X3 give you.
The Phenom II X6 1075T is an interesting chip as you get a lot of compute but it's only useful in heavily threaded apps. While AMD does have its own turbo mode on the 1075T, it's not enough to save the chip in lightly threaded applications.
The Phenom II X4 970 can be pretty close to the Core i5 760 however. Intel is faster in gaming and certain applications (e.g. Photoshop), while AMD was competitive in our encoding test and Cinebench.
Overall I'd say the new Athlon II X4 and X3 are really the stars of the show. If you're spending ~$100 on a new CPU, AMD makes it.
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Guspaz - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
A few price to performance graphs would be nice. You know, "sysmarks per dollar", or that sort of thing. It would help identify the sweet spot in processor reviews.Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
I've been thinking about doing it for a while, it looks like there's overwhelming desire for it so I'll begin working on the best way to put it together :)Take care,
Anand
Taft12 - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
I'm not sure "Sysmarks/$" is all that more useful than a general recommendation that the results reveal quite clearly. In this article for example, the Athlon X3 is a stellar value while the Athlon X4 and i5 quad cores are also very good.However, this has been common knowledge for over a year now, so are we really getting anything we didn't already know from a "Sysmarks/$"-type of graph?
RyuDeshi - Monday, September 27, 2010 - link
I haven't been in the market for a new processor/chipset for over a year now, so price/performance is something that would be very helpful for me right now with all these newer chips since Core2 and Phenom I. So I concur with the OP, I would love to see some price references in or near some graphs.marraco - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
No, please. Do not do bar charts. Do X-Y price-performance charts. They are far more useful.vol7ron - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
I'm kind of partial to the smallnetbuilder's price-performance chart: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/index.php?option=co...You can hover to see the item.
evilspoons - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
Seconded. X-Y performance charts are the way to go!!evilspoons - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
Err, price-performance.Brucmack - Wednesday, September 22, 2010 - link
If you do that, please integrate the differences in power consumption somehow. It would be silly to save $20 by buying an AMD processor if it costs $50 more to run over its lifetime.strikeback03 - Wednesday, September 22, 2010 - link
How long would that lifetime be? 1 year? 4 years? Is the machine on all the time but idling 22 hrs a day? Is it gamed on 10 hrs a day but off the rest?