630AMD always come late to the show but when they arrive, they astonish others with their ultimate low price offerings compared to that of Intel. Their latest Athlon II X4 is the world’s first quad core CPU to be priced at less than  $100. Their earlier quad core processors called Phenom II X4 processors were priced above $200. On the Intel’s part their Core 2 Quad and Core 2 Extreme processors are always on the higher side of price range. This means that if you want the cheapest quad core processor you have to go with the AMD Athlon II X4 processors. But does it have enough performance to be considered a processor as good as intel’s? We have made a review to find out. Have a go.

Architecture

The processor is neither a scaled down Phenom II nor a pair of Athlon X2 processors into a single package. It is a brand new die with four cores in a single die. But unlike the Athlon II X2, each core only has a 512MB L2 cache per core making it a total of 2MB L2 cache. There is no L3 cache as the rest of the Athlon lineup. The absence of L3 cache makes the die small and also less costly to manufacture. The architecture is also changed a bit so that it won’t absolutely require the L3 cache. But however, the omitting takes toll on performance. The overall productivity is downed at least by 20% at the same clock speed.

Any way, the Athlon II X4 packs in all other features of the Phenom II including dual channel memory controller with DDR3 support, 128 bit SSE/FP Unit, HT 3.0 and other optimization techniques that were introduces with the Phenom II.
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Default Clock Speed and overclockability

The new Athlon II X4 processor series currently has two models : the Athlon II X4 630 and Athlon II X4 620. The 620 runs at 2.6 GHz and the 630 runs at a bit higher speed at 2.8 GHz.

You can’t overclock these processors to a large extent and you have to look for Phenom IIs for good overclocking. Any way a moderate overclocking to 3.25 GHz was possible without breaking its normal core voltage. With an extra 300mV you can approach to 3.4GHz but no further.
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Price

The 620 model is priced at $99 while the 630 model is priced at $122. This makes them by far the cheapest quad core option. The lowest Core 2 Quad Processor from Intel the Q8200 is priced at $163.
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Overall

This processors from AMD is expected to be competing with the cheapest quad core solution from Intel, the Q8200. The performance of AMD Athlon II X4 beats the performance of Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 for some cases like video encoding and the Q8200 beats 620 in other cases. Overall, the performance of those devices are competing but the price of 620 is 40% lesser than the other which makes it a winner.
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