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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KikassAssassin - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
On page 1: "The Core i3 540 is priced similarly but you only get two cores, and no Hyper Threading to bridge the gap."The Core i3 does have HyperThreading. The only Clarkdale CPU without HyperThreading is the Pentium G6950.
quiksilvr - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
One issue I'm having is the weird color scheme in your graphs. Just make all AMDs green and all Intel's blue. Stop mixing and matching randomly. It makes the colors useless and misleading.Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
I only highlighted the new chips we were focusing on. I debated doing it the other way (AMD green, Intel blue) but figured the focus should be on the new chips. I can understand the confusion though. I've updated the graphs to reflect green for AMD and blue for Intel, if everyone is ok with it I'll keep it :)Take care,
Anand
quiksilvr - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
Much appreciated! A suggestion could be this to differentiate between old and new:Light Blue for New Intels
Dark and less saturated Blue for Old Intels
Light Green for New AMDs
Dark and less saturated Green for Old AMDs
vol7ron - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
This sounds good to me - just don't make the contrast too different that we have to look at 4 different colors. The greens should be close enough in spectrum that they can be distinguished but close to the same hue (same for the blue).That way looking at a glance your brain can quickly compare overall AMD vs Intel, but then giving it more consideration you can tell what's new/old.
KikassAssassin - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
This sounds like the best option to me.JarredWalton - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
I've updated the graphs to use the dark/light colors, though I'm not sure how "new" some of the Intel parts are. Anyway, at least there's a bit of separation to make things "visible".quiksilvr - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
You guys are awesome! You're like, one of the busiest gadget sites on the web yet you took the time to read my suggestion and actually implement it!High five!
(turns off Adblock for Anandtech.com)
vol7ron - Wednesday, September 22, 2010 - link
i think the light green is a little too light, but much betterfoundchild1 - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
Have you guys ever thought about placing the prices of the chips in the benchmark tables for easy price reference? Perhaps just to the right of the benchmarks?Just a suggestion!
Thanks for this update as well, AMD is starting to regain my interest.