AMD Athlon II X4 640 & X4 610e Review - PAGE 1

The recent launch of the Phenom II X6 1055T and 1090T processors have created lots of excitement in the different enthusiast communities. Looking at the roadmaps, these will most probably make for the last major innovation from AMD before the launch of its first Fusion branded products, which have on-chip GPUs, and are slated for mass production in the second quarter of this year.

In the mean time, processor development has not stood still at AMD. Committed to delivering the best bang-for-the-buck, a slew of new processors were launched today, all made on the Athlon II architecture. What is interesting is that these are all made on the third revision of the Athlon II architecture. Will it yield great results?  If we recall the last revision of the Phenom II die, we did see a great increase in over-clockability, a more robust memory controller and a decrease in power consumption. Let's just hope it will be the same for the Athlon IIs.

To find out, we will look at two of the six new processors: the Athlon II X4 640 and the Athlon II X4 610e. The former is part of the standard Athlon II quad-core lineup. The latter is a low-power edition, which will be analyzed on the next page.

Specifications

Pricing

Let's take this occasion to draw an updated table of actual processor pricing, like it was done in previous articles. It contains prices from the popular e-tailer Newegg.com. Under $200, the processors were grouped to show which ones are, according to a personal opinion, in direct competition. Today's launched processors are in bold.

For processors over $200, Neoseeker's recent review of AMD's new Thuban processors out-lined the change-ups in that market segment -- so let's look at what is going on in the sub-$200 marketplace this time around.

From $182 to $133, AMD offers its second best lineup, the Phenom II quad-cores. These fight against the older LGA775 dual-cores, which have much less reason to be in this price range anymore, because of AMD's latest moves. As for the Core 2 Quads, the highest-clocked runs at a mere 2.66GHz, whereas the slowest Phenom II X4 beats it at 2.8Ghz. These architectures have roughly the same computing power at similar frequencies, so considering the much lower price of AMD processors, the choice should not be hard to make.

At the $122 mark, one can buy the subject of this review: the Athlon II X4 640. The Core 2 Duos will obviously be no match for it. The question is, how does it compare to the Core i3-530? That will be answered throughout this article. Next, one can get the Athlon II X4 635 and below, for less than $100. Will the similarly-priced Pentium G6950 based on the Nehalem architecture hold its own? The next few pages should settle this question as well. Below the $120 mark, the duals and tri-cores from AMD go against the slower-clocked Core 2 Duos. In this low price bracket, AMD has the parts to really make things trickier for Intel in 2010.