AMD announces cheapest ever quad-core chip

Posted on 16 Sep 2009 at 15:20

Today AMD announced its Athlon II X4 620 processor, which it claims will sell in the US for less than $100, that should be make it around £69 inc VAT in the UK. It's a major price drop for such a chip, being £23 cheaper than the cheapest quad-core processor in our recent components group test, the Phenom X4 9950 Black Edition

It's the first quad-core chip bearing the Athlon branding, rather than the newer Phenom name, which itself demonstrates that such processors have become surprisingly affordable.

The 620 is an AM3 processor, and so will fit any AM2+ or AM3 motherboards, though you may need a BIOS update. It has a 2.6GHz clock speed, slightly slower than the dual-core Athlon IIs we've seen before. Surprisingly, it has the same amount of L2 cache as the dual-core designs, with only 2MB shared by the four cores. This is undoubtedly how AMD has kept the price so low, and we're interested to see how this affects our benchmark scores. We think you'd have to be running a lot of fully multi-threaded applications, like video encoding, to make this processor a better bet over a faster Athlon II X2 chip.

At present, retailers, like www.aria.co.uk have the procesor listed for around £75 inc VAT, but this should fall after the initial launch frenzy.

All in all, it's great to have such a low-cost quad-core option on the market. We'll bring you a full review as soon as we can get our hands on a sample.

Author: Seth Barton

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