Who said Athlon is dead and that the Phenom processors have reign supreme in the quad core processors in the ages of 2008 and also 2009. Well, not entirely, they are considered the much cheaper alternative. Well the Phenom series is an obvious reason of being one of the most high end processors that AMD have in stock and in fire in some of the good parts, like a much better over-clocking potential and have no problems of using sub-zero temps in super over-clocking like one of those extreme clocks being seen in computer conventions.
It is no secret that AMD is at a distinct disadvantage from Intel. The company is far smaller, their quarterly profits are currently non-existent, they recently had to spin off their manufacturing arm, and their R&D budget for processor development is far, far lower than what Intel is able to throw at their engineers. Other than that, AMD is in pretty good shape.
So that is a bit tongue in cheek, but when we look overall at the company, we can see some marked improvements. Their Phenom II series are now much more competitive with what Intel has to offer, and they are able to sell products above the $200 mark. This is a significant improvement over just a year ago when their top quad part was selling for around $169, and the majority of their lineup was under $100.
AMD has also been making some real headway in the integrated chipset market. The older 780G is still a top seller, and a good foundation for many budget desktop computers. The latest 785G has improved performance a bit, and has also really helped in advancing new and usable features into the integrated space. The graphics portion of the company has done well with the HD 4000 series of standalone cards, and their upcoming DX 11 lineup will redefine the graphics industry throughout the rest of this year.
Considering that AMD is the second best CPU manufacturer/designer in the world, and they are #2 in shipments, we have to give credit where it is due. AMD has survived in the face of extreme competition with Intel, and with the latest influx of money the company has received from their financial dealings this year, they should be around for some time to come.
The answer to that one is to design a much more size optimized Phenom II. Most engineers say that around 80% of an X86 design is dedicated to achieving that last 10% of performance. AMD scratched their heads a bit and decided that it might be worthwhile to cut out the 6 MB of L3 cache from the Phenom II design, and rework the architecture a bit so that it won’t absolutely require it. The Athlon II is the culmination of that endeavor. The Athlon II X2 that was released some months ago is a standalone product comprised of two Phenom II cores with 1 MB of L2 cache a piece. Though the L2 is enlarged from the other Phenom II parts, the Athlon II X2 is still one of the smaller dual core dies around at 117.5 mm squared (though the Core 2 45 nm part is 107 mm squared). And performance did not suffer too terribly much as compared to the much larger Phenom II X2 that was released at the same time.
But overall the new AMD Athlon II X4 630 processor, a cheap alternative quad core processor than the more expensive side of AMD Phenom, while still have some short comings in the performance and core clock frequencies, but the over-clocking is somewhat usable when having a cooler capable to keep it cool.