Intel has just launched its Lynnfield platform, but there's some good news from the green camp as well.

As we said yesterday, AMD's cacheless Propus quads have started shipping, and these 45nm parts should be the cheapest 45nm quads on the market. Chinese hacks over at Inpai have put the Athlon II X4 620 through its paces and came up with some interesting results.

The 620 is clocked at 2.6GHz and has just 2MB of L2 cache. However, due to the lack of L3 it's relatively cheap to produce, and AMD is selling them at around €85. Inpai compared its performance to Intel's cheapest quad, the 2.33GHz Q8200, priced at €115

The Athlon offers similar performance in most tests, trailing the Q8200 by a slight margin, but in some benches such as PC Mark Vantage and some game tests it even manages to outperform the Intel part.

Inpai managed to overclock the Athlon to 3.6GHz, although the performance increase over an overclock to 3.25GHz isn't significant in most scenarios.

It should be noted that reviewers used P45 and AMD 770X boards with DDR2 memory, and you could probably squeeze a bit more performance Intel's way if you went for DDR3. Be as it may, the Athlon II sounds like a very good deal for value minded consumers, as it both the CPUs and the motherboards are cheaper than Intel's, and you can use cheap DDR2 without a significant performance penalty.

You can find the review here.