Well, it had to happen sooner or later. Quietly last night, AMD went ahead and slashed prices on existing Phenom II and Athlon II processors, discontinuing a handful of chips in the process. In addition, the company publicly introduced a handful of new Athlon II CPUs, including low-power and triple-core models.
The company’s official price list still says “Effective September 16,” but it’s changed quite a bit since then. Here’s what’s left of AMD’s previous desktop CPU lineup:
| Processor | Cores | Speed | L2 cache | L3 cache | TDP | Old price | New price |
| Phenom II X4 965 BE | 4 | 3.4GHz | 2MB | 6MB | 140W | $245 | $195 |
| Phenom II X4 955 BE | 4 | 3.2GHz | 2MB | 6MB | 125W | $245 | $175 |
| Phenom II X4 945 | 4 | 3.0GHz | 2MB | 6MB | 95W | $225 | $165 |
| Phenom II X4 905e | 4 | 2.5GHz | 2MB | 6MB | 65W | $175 | $175 |
| Phenom II X3 705e | 3 | 2.5GHz | 1.5MB | 6MB | 65W | $125 | $125 |
| Athlon II X4 630 | 4 | 2.8GHz | 2MB | – | 95W | $122 | $122 |
| Athlon II X4 620 | 4 | 2.6GHz | 2MB | – | 95W | $99 | $99 |
| Athlon II X2 250 | 2 | 3.0GHz | 2MB | – | 65W | $87 | $69 |
| Athlon II X2 245 | 2 | 2.9GHz | 2MB | – | 65W | $66 | $64 |
| Athlon II X2 240 | 2 | 2.8GHz | 2MB | – | 65W | $60 | $60 |
| Sempron 140 | 1 | 2.7GHz | 512KB | – | 45W | $36 | $36 |
That’s right—no more Phenom II X4 810, Phenom II X3 720, or Phenom II X2 550. No more Socket AM2+ Phenom IIs. No more processors priced higher than $200, either—you can credit the arrival of Intel’s Core i5 and i7-800 processors for that. That said, we grabbed the “old” prices in the table above from Google’s cache of the price list, but actual e-tail prices were already a little bit lower before this latest round of cuts.
What about those new Athlon IIs? Here they are:
| Processor | Cores | Speed | L2 cache | L3 cache | TDP | Old price | New price |
| Athlon II X4 605e | 4 | 2.3GHz | 2MB | – | 45W | – | $143 |
| Athlon II X4 600e | 4 | 2.2GHz | 2MB | – | 45W | – | $133 |
| Athlon II X3 435 | 3 | 2.9GHz | 1.5MB | – | 95W | – | $87 |
| Athlon II X3 425 | 3 | 2.7GHz | 1.5MB | – | 95W | – | $76 |
| Athlon II X3 405e | 3 | 2.3GHz | 1.5MB | – | 45W | – | $102 |
| Athlon II X3 400e | 3 | 2.2GHz | 1.5MB | – | 45W | – | $97 |
| Athlon II X2 240e | 2 | 2.8GHz | 2MB | – | 45W | – | $77 |
| Athlon II X2 235e | 2 | 2.7GHz | 2MB | – | 45W | – | $69 |
The low-power “e” chips might not be too terribly exciting, but the Athlon II X3 435 and 425 are a different story: they have three cores, relatively high clock speeds, and price tags well under $100. Heck, the slowest one is only $7 more than AMD’s fastest dual-core Athlon II.
If you count the Athlon II X4 620, which has weathered this storm without budging from its $99 notch on the price ladder, AMD now offers three sub-$100 processors with more than two cores. Intel offers none—and probably won’t for the foreseeable future. Clarkdale, which may come out in early January, will have two cores with Hyper-Threading capabilities, however.
This seems to be more of a paper launch. We were supposed to see 45W chips back in September, but I’ve yet to find any notable online retailer who has any in stock.
Directron, Newegg, Provantage, eWiz, Mwave, and several other of my main e-shops don’t seem to have any of the new 45W parts. (If things have changed since last night, point me in the right direction!)
What gives? Are OEMs sponging all of the new parts for their desktops? If so, this would be remarkably similar to the Athlon EE 3800 a few years ago. No one could find the 35W or 45W desktop CPUs, as almost all of ’em went to OEMs.
People throw around the “paper launch” term too lightly. I don’t even see a release date on that list.
As far as I ever knew, they were saving everything but the few Athlon IIs that were released earlier on for the Windows 7 launch. Considering that they “announced” all of these new ones in this updated price list only days before October 22nd, that still seems to be the case.
“You can buy a seriously cheap VM server out of these! What do you pick: $99 quad (but at 95W) or the $133 quad at 45W? Both have hardware acceleration! ”
45W TDP is joke
First: TDP are not accurate measurement of power consumption
Second: the 45W processors are underclocked. I think you can easily get almost the same power consumption with 95W versions by under-clocking them.
So, 95w versions are better choice, and they are cheaper as well
A test! A test! My E7200 for a test!
LOL.
Seriously guys, why are the tests so late? Anand, Toms and XBit all have detailed reviews on the new Athlon II X3’s. Why is Techreport still carrying only the news?
One big breadbox?
I miss the early reviews on your side. Also pl give us an option to print the whole review rather than view it over umpteen pages. The rest have this feature since long and its very convenient to save the entire review as a single .mht file through Opera.
So you’re saying that TR should stop doing what they do and become Anandtech?
This site is not a carbon copy of any other site. You like someone else’s site layout better . . then go there.
Duh, duh! LOL, dude LOL? Ring a bell?
Dude, get to the groove.
What I said was that I ‘miss’ the early reports on TR’s side. They used to do it, but of late they seem to have fallen back.
Thanks for your ‘patriotism’ but each and every site offers different perspectives to every issue, including reviews.
I stopped going to Tom’s when the page exploded in a mess of crap, and recently stopped Anand’s feed from my RSS reader when I started getting essentially press releases and incomplete “previews” pushed to me. No thanks. Not like I’m in a rush, ever, for this info, except maybe storage stuff is interesting to me currentlyg{<.<}g
A fond farewell to the X2 550BE. Too good a deal to last forever, I guess. It seemed as though most of the people who wanted to unlock all 4 cores were able to do so, and most were able to overclock to 3.7 GHz (including mine).
/bye
Athlon II X2 240e. That’s for me. Intel, who cares? Otellini has enough money already.
So the Phenom X2’s are all gone? I just built a system for my wife to do contract work at home around the ECS A785GM-M motherboard and the Phenom X2 550 BE (3.1GHz, 6MB L3 cache). I went with the Phenom X2 because of: a) the high clock speed, and b) the large L3 cache. I figured those two features would make for the best single-threaded performance for the dollar.
Now you can get an Athlon X2 250, but that’s only 3.0GHz and no L3 at all.
P.S. I haven’t tried to overclock it because the ECS board doesn’t support ACC and it seems to be just fine without it.
I can tell you right now why AMD offers a more appealing platform, Support & socket schemes. Intels goofy socket schemes and market segmentation really alienated me. After 5 years of the same socket Intel has gone and introduced two new consumer sockets simultaneously, BS I say. Meanwhile AMD’s new processors are backwards compatible and support DDR3 and DDR2. From a more primitive consumer perspective AMD offers a better platform if you consider more than benchmarks.
Completely pointless. The Market = regular people buying their PCs from Best Buy, Fry’s, Dell, HP etc. The Market doesn’t care about DDR this and DDR that – their PC comes with the right DDR and it works. The Market doesn’t care about an upgrade path – to The Market, upgrade = buying a new PC.
Optimizing enthusiasts like you are a drop in a bucket to either company (although AMD’s bucket is much smaller, so they might actually care about a drop).
I’d like to see a BE model of the Athlon II X2. See how high that native dual-core die can clock.
Amen to that brothel. I’m pretty certain there are a fair few others that would be interested in such an animal. And get ballsy and price the thing at $99 with a 3.0 GHz default clock and AMD would sell hoards of them. People would respect the shrewdness of such a move. Edit: except I’d want it to be and X4, not an X2.
“Amen to that brothel.”
Paging Doc Freud…
Heh…;) Heh…;)
l[<*[
Brothel is a very amusing typo. edit: nevermind, someone beat me to it long ago.
It wasn’t a typo! Just my odd sense of humor.
Are the current ones limited by the locked multiplier?
Lol not really. You could hit 4 GHz on the cheap ones, with a cheap motherboard.
Overclocking AMD *sucks* without the unlock.
That’s quite the sweeping generalization. :p
Go look at the 785G board review here. Despite the fact that it’s a brand new chipset, one could only hit 230 MHz, while the other easily does 290 MHz.
It’s always been that way, for both AMD and Intel. You have to make sure you’ve got the right setup for overclocking.
Multiplier or system clock, it should still be just changing one setting, provided you’ve looked into what you buy.
I have the 785G board that hit 290. Overclocking AMD involve messing with all kinds of crap:
§[<http://www.techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=59947<]§
I know there have been some potential hitches in the past, but I don’t think it’s as problematic as it’s made out to be with /[http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3512&p=11<]§
The trouble is that the BEs are always the most expensive, with the highest stock multiplier. If there were a BE Athlon II, it would already be 15x or higher, and Phenom IIs with lower multipliers still don't have issues.
OK, I hope that’s true.
The BE’s may be most expensive within the same line of processors, but the X3 720 BE at ~$110 is still pretty attractive.
Doesn’t seem too complex although it’s no easy peasy BE overclocking. Ever tried oc’ing a quad core Intel CPU on a P45 board? Voltages, GTL refs, Vtt settings…it’s not always a walk in the park.
I OC’ed my 965 to 4ghz with a couple clicks in the cmos setup… just changed from “auto” to 4ghz.
I love this am3 platform. I like the power on and reset buttons on the mainboard, so you can play with it without attaching the front panel connections from your case.
Plus
*waits for some fool to get all happy in the pants over TDP ratings*
Oh nevermind, already happened!
I’d be happy if they were sticking them in laptops and charging the same prices.
But as a desktop part, I’m baffled by both the price premium and the idea itself.
At least the pricing scheme is otherwise proportional, whereas there are a lot of options in the Phenom II range that just plain make no sense.
So what is the heir to the X3 720?
Seems safe to say that there is not one, at least not at this point. Heh, look at me, I sprung for the 955 BE and I have been running it at stock the whole time. Kinda not much motivation, what with it being pretty damn fast at stock speed.
For me nothing is really fast enough when it comes to a day-to-day use machine since I Fold on those things. 😛
Well, good luck with that!
It’s the Athlon II X3 435
At a similar price, the X4 630. But you’re trading, in most cases, cache you did use for a core you probably won’t.
I’m sure the X3 720 will stay around for a while.
The other thing you are giving up is the unlocked multiplier of the Black Edition.
Gone from the price list usually means EOL, no?
At retail. In some cases they continue to exist purely to supply an OEM.
There are eventually going to be higher clocked versions of everything they’re dumping.
Those will probably come along with a 3.6 GHz quad-core, once there’s a new stepping and a reason to bother with it.
They probably don’t get very many with defective cache or cores anymore, so they’re just anticipating that there won’t be any more demand for the current models than the supply they already have.
A new stepping is weeks away – Nov. 4 if the rumours are correct.
All those processors on the chart make my head hurt.
1. Where is the 95w 955BE
2. Sad to see very few BE
3. With the good press of the PII 720 BE, I think it was a mistake to have removed it.
The Athlon II X3 435 seems a little… useless. Why would someone not spend the extra $12 and get the X4 620? You get one more core and you get a full 2MB of L2 instead of 1.5MB. Sure, 300Mhz but the difference that would make is minimal.
each core has 500kb L2 cache, hence 2MB on the X4 and 1.5MB on the X3. You’re not getting anything extra than additional core gives you in the first place 🙂
I cant find a Athlon II X3 435 on newegg, are these new ones not available yet?
PS> Nevermind, after reading the news article for a third time it finally clicked that it says SEPTEMBER not October. My bad.
Finally. I’m looking to put a 605e in my HTPC.
You should wait for i5 660.
I was thinking the same thing, a low power 605e quad code should give a nice HTPC coupled with a 785g chipset.
I don’t know what this has to do with a core i5 660, which will cost more, use more power and will only have 2 cores, and is predicted to come out some time early next year. The first 3 reasons are bad enough but I’d like my HTPC working before Christmas! I see the i5 660 making sense in a low(ish) cost gaming machine, but not in a low power HTPC.
Yeah, a 45W Quad in my HTPC would be perfect. I’m running a 1.9ghz AMD X2 and it definitely gets a little choppy if something starts running in the background. This would smooth it right out. The new Hypertransport upgrade would also help out the 780G.
r[
AMD didn’t do this to be nice. They are doing it to survive. About 4 months before Conroe launched, AMD had the performance crown and raised prices:
§[<http://www.techreport.com/discussions.x/9761<]§ As nice as these prices are, I am sure that AMD is just itching to charge as much as they can for these and I am not sure if biting is the best idea. Intel never raises its prices. AMD has in the past and I am sure it would again, provided it manages to wrestle the performance crown away from Intel.
g{
If you owned a company and had the best product and you knew company “x” was coming out with something way better but not for a few months what would stop you from inching up prices a bit to try and compensate? Its not like they doubled in price very slightly I believe was the description. Had they not done this I would question if they belonged in business. Obviously your fanboyism has blurred your vision to the difference of smart business practices and shady business practices or maybe you just didn’t think it all the way through :).
You replied to the wrong person.
If you had not said fanboyism, I would not have known why you cared so much:
§[<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection<]§
/[<"If you owned a company and had the best product and you knew company "x" was coming out with something way better but not for a few months what would stop you from inching up prices a bit to try and compensate? Its not like they doubled in price very slightly I believe was the description."<]/ Well, customer perception, for one. Just the notification of a price increase can set back sales. I don't even bother looking at newegg anymore for SSD's, I *know* I can find them elsewhere better price, and have been, for 2 months now. Newegg has lost potentially hundreds in sales from me, based on this alone, and I'm sure quite a few enthusiasts, if I'm reading the reviews right over there. Which is fine. I'm not whining about price raises, but I also don't think it comes without its own set of consequences. A price raise in general mens somebody misguided the market, or availability is slim and demand is greatg{<.<}g
Intel doesn’t need to raise its prices, because it charges more for its processors than AMD does whether it has the performance crown or not. =P
Bingo.
I won’t argue with you if it’s right or not that AMD hasn’t good pricing politic practices either like intel has. But that doesn’t mean that ‘s not interesting to us to see such good deals at extremly low pricing.
I guess Intel is making Westmere “to survive,” then, too.
Gourd forbid they move to more cost effective products in the day and age of Atom CPUs being plenty for most people.
I fail to see Westmere’s relationship with this.
I will never understand the need for *both* the 965 BE and the 955 BE.
Nice to see the x4 8xx chips die. Wish they’d never launched.
Shame to see the x3-720 go down. That was a hawt deal.
Price drops are always nice.
Time for a new CPU Value bake-off, Cyril?
Until they can get the 965 down to 125W, that is the reason; not everyone’s packing a top spec mobo.
I’m pretty sure the 945 was already at $165 too, deal not made sweet enough to me.
^This, pretty much.
Yeah, I bought a 95W 945 for $169.99 almost a month ago (I think Newegg listed it at $179.99 with $10 instant savings — the higher watt version was simply listed as $169.99). Now it’s listed as $170.99 with $5 instant savings.
They have /[
While it sucks for them that they don’t get to line their pockets with a few $500 or $1,000 CPUs in the desktop market, I’m not going to complain that you actually get what you pay for.
It just /[
You can buy a seriously cheap VM server out of these! What do you pick: $99 quad (but at 95W) or the $133 quad at 45W? Both have hardware acceleration!
Yeah, those chips deserve to /[
I definitely want to build a VM server and toss a bunch of stuff on it. Toss in some smallish HDD to host: Windows, Ubuntu server, FreeNAS. Then have freeNAS do all the heavy sharing with large HDs.
Toss in 8GB of ram and those three won’t even make a dent on the resources.