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.