AMD Athlon II X4 620 & 630: The First $99 Quad Core CPU
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 16, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
DivX 8.5.3 with Xmpeg 5.0.3
Our DivX test is the same DivX / XMpeg 5.03 test we've run for the past few years now, the 1080p source file is encoded using the unconstrained DivX profile, quality/performance is set balanced at 5 and enhanced multithreading is enabled:
Four cores and you're good to go with video encoding. The Athlon II X4s are faster than the Q8200 and even the Phenom II X3 720. Intel doesn't have anything that offers better performance at $99 from a video encoding standpoint.
x264 HD Video Encoding Performance
Graysky's x264 HD test uses the publicly available x264 codec (open source implementation of H.264) to encode a 4Mbps 720p MPEG-2 source. The focus here is on quality rather than speed, thus the benchmark uses a 2-pass encode and reports the average frame rate in each pass.
The Athlon II X4 continues to beat up on more expensive chips. The Q8200 and the E7500 don't stand a chance. Only the Phenom II X4 and Core i5 are faster.
The Core 2 Quad Q8200 is only able to match the Athlon II X4 620 in performance here. While I'm used to writing that AMD needs to adjust prices downward, here the pressure falls on Intel.
Windows Media Encoder 9 x64 Advanced Profile
In order to be codec agnostic we've got a Windows Media Encoder benchmark looking at the same sort of thing we've been doing in the DivX and x264 tests, but using WME instead.
The Athlon II X4s round up our video encoding tests in the lead. At $99 you can't buy a better quad-core processor, or even dual-core for that matter if you're going to be encoding video.
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Genx87 - Monday, September 21, 2009 - link
This losing battle for AMD has been going on since the introduction of the Core 2 Duo years ago. Where have you been?mdk77777 - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
945 has been at $170 for weeks. That's a $55 difference from the price listed by ANAND :!: , it is also available at 95 watt :!:955 has been at or below $200
But that would conflict with the second coming of I5 at $210 so he conveniently ignores current pricing. :mrgreen:
Talk about bias, you write an article about pricing and market position and then ignore current pricing and market positions.
Pretty amazing.
Voo - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
You do understand what the listed prices are, and just want to flame, right?mdk77777 - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
How does AMD respond to Lynnfield? Is it by drastically cutting prices on Phenom II? Nope.Thats how the article starts. Correct, but they lowered prices weeks ago in anticipation.
A list price means nothing if it has been widely, significantly, and uniformly discounted.
Obviously they will update. Again, a story about market prices and market value of various CPU should reflect the market pricing.
yacoub - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
you are correct that the actual prices are what matters -- after all, the entire point of this (and most if not all) article(s) here are for the benefit of people considering a purchase.Lolimaster - Thursday, September 17, 2009 - link
And then they talk about anand not being biased...PII 955 $189
PII 945 $169
Hey even in my country (Peru) wich has a lot of tech taxes the 955 costs less than AMD "official" price.
silverblue - Thursday, September 17, 2009 - link
Depending on which sites someone uses, they may not offer a better deal than another site they may be unaware of, likewise they could get a CPU for cheaper than you or I can. It's strictly relative in the end and doubtful to be the result of some sort of bias. Anand seems very impressed with the Propus and so too will be a lot of other people.Looking more closely at it, I believe it should perform closely with a similarly clocked (or overclocked?) Phenom I due to the lack of an L3 cache, though I couldn't say which would perform faster. Incidentally, I've been checking dabs.com and their most popular CPU is the Phenom X4 9650 at about £80; this is only 2.3GHz and is more expensive than the newly-launched Athlon II X4 620 by about £5, so it stands to reason that people will go for this one instead soon enough.
What I would really like to see, however, is a direct comparison between the 620 and the PII X4 905e (2.5GHz, 6MB L3) - it should be relatively simple to overclock one/downclock the other and see how much the lack of an L3 cache hurts the Athlon in a head-to-head, why the Athlon II X4's TDP is 95W whereas the 905e (with the 6MB L3 cache, remember) has a TDP of 65W, and whether it's worth the extra £50 for the 905e.
I did look at other CPU prices on this site as well as on a couple of others. The PII X4 955 and the i5-750 are roughly the same at about £150-£155 (though dabs.com has the 955 as £165 for some daft reason), whereas the PII X4 965 is closer to £180. It's very important to look around for the best price, however I'm starting to doubt the reason for the 965's existence now, at least until they cut its price.
mapesdhs - Thursday, September 17, 2009 - link
Indeed, shopping around is essential, and watchout for shipping
charges aswell.
After deciding what to buy, I Google for the part numbers or names
of the items I want, gather a selection of sites, see what can be
saved re shipping costs by buying multiple items from one seller.
I've ended up using a variety of companies over the years, sometimes
well known (Dabs, Scan, Microdirect), sometimes more obscure (Komplett,
C&C Central, Lambdatek, Overclockers, Tekheads). And doing it this
way means one has a better chance of locating special offers. I also
check on eBay for BIN offers from reputable sellers, which in one
case resulted in the best price for a PSU I wanted. The company names
above are in the UK, but the same applies anywhere.
Ian.
East17 - Thursday, September 17, 2009 - link
1. A benchmark should test the architecture clock for clock. Dynamic overclocking just messes things up even if it's on by default.Sure Turbo is a nice addition and sure it should have been available ever since dual core CPUs appeared just to prove customers that you're doing something about single thread performance too.
Turbo is a feature, not an architectural advantage. It's like saying a mainboard with Quad GigabutLAN on P45 is more performant than a Dual LAN on X58 just because it has this feature of having four LAN ports. Sure, if you do a LAN performance test you could find many ways in which you could show that the mainboard with Quad LAN is faster but surely you couldn't argue that P45 is superior to X58.
Anyway ... the testing shoul have been done with Turbo on and Turbo off to clearly show thr difference .
2.Deneb is 252% of Propus (300mln -> 758 transistors) but only offers around 10% performance improvement... Could you justify making the die size so much bigger just for 10%? Besides, if we talk about profit, if 252% = 225$ (Phenom 3GHz) and 100% = 99$ (Athlon II X4) ... Propus seems more profitable .
carniver - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
Athlon: Emergency Edition