This AMD processor is a great rival for Intel processor on i3 series, AMD processor Athlon II X4 is a really strong performer at an attractive price point. The architecture this processor showing its age as the Phenom II X4′s boast a lot more speed. From a power consumption basis, it is fairly clear that the Athlon II X4 does a solid job keeping power consumption low at idle, but during heavy workloads power consumption spikes quite a bit.
For a four to eight drive home server or NAS appliance where video encoding and virtualized workloads are intended applications, this is going to be a strong consideration for a lot of people as it saves over $100 versus a Xeon X3440 CPU while delivering most of the performance. In the near future I will look at the Athlon II X3 440 and Athlon II X2 250 on the new test platform to test AMD’s 3.0GHz range, but the Athlon II X4 640 does provide a fairly solid value for a lot of use cases.
While the architecture between the Athlon II X2 260 and Athlon II X4 640 are similar, the dual core part runs 200MHz faster and has 1MB of L2 cache per core versus the quad core’s 512KB of L2 cache per core. It would have been nice to see a Athlon II X4 4MB L2 cache part, but for more on-die cache one can just look to the Phenom II line with its L3 cache, so the Athlon II X4 does make sense given AMD’s market segmentation. AMD has a CPU right in the
Intel Core i3-530 and
i3-540 range that is very competitive in terms of price/ performance. And after all this processor seems good for save your money but still have ability to run fast.
Technical Details :
- Operating Frequency: 3.0 GHz
