AMD has seen not a major resurgence but somewhat of a comeback with Phenom II and it's ability to overclock, good prices, and solid motherboards at decent prices compared to the Core i7 products. Lynnfield came out last week however and seems to have reclaimed the $200+ market space AMD was starting to break into and to be the best choice for many to choose from between Core 2 Quads and Core i7. That seems to have changed for now but AMD is far from done and bringing quad core to levels not seen with their new AMD Athlon II X4 620 processor released today.

The Phenom II X4 is based off a brand new die and as with other Athlon II processors there is no L3 cache to save on cost in manufacturing however there also isn't an increase in L2 cache which stays at 2MB for both the Athlon II X2 and Athlon II X4. The architecture is the same for the one based off Phenom II but cache sizes are now a significant part of a CPU's die size so getting rid of this helps drive down the price significantly. As with other AMD processors since Phenom II this is compatible with both Socket AM2+ and Socket AM3 motherboards so you can use DDR2 or DDR3, whichever is best for you which is great for those with DDR2 lying around or who don't want to upgrade their motherboard. AMD specifically is targeting this with the recently released 785G motherboard which have a lot of great boards in their line-up for under $80. The Athlon II X4 620 we'll be reviewing comes in at $99 for quad core based off Phenom II architecture, that's going to be hard for Intel to beat or more so impossible right now.

Here are the technical specs from AMD.

Model Number, Core Frequency & Price: X4 620 / 2.6GHz / $99

Model Number, Core Frequency & Price: X4 630 / 2.8GHz / $122 )

Tray OPNs: TRAY OPN# ADX620WFK42GI / ADX630WFK42GI

Processor in a Box OPNs: PIB OPN# ADX620WFGIBOX / ADX630WFGIBOX

L1 Cache Sizes: 64K of L1 instruction and 64K of L1 data cache per core (512KB total L1 per processor)

L2 Cache Sizes: 512KB of L2 data cache per core (2MB total L2 per processor)

Memory Controller Type: Integrated 128-bit wide memory controller *

Memory Controller Speed: Up to 2.0GHz with Dual Dynamic Power Management

Types of Memory Supported: Unregistered DIMMs up to PC2-8500 (DDR2-1066MHz) -AND- PC3-10600 (DDR3-1333MHz)

HyperTransport 3.0 Specification: One 16-bit/16-bit link @ up to 4.0GHz full duplex (2.0GHz x2)

Total Processor-to-System Bandwidth: Up to 37.3GB/s total bandwidth [Up to 21.3 GB/s memory bandwidth (DDR3-1333) + 16.0GB/s (HT3)]

Up to 33.1GB/s total bandwidth [Up to 17.1 GB/s memory bandwidth (DDR2-1066) + 16.0GB/s (HT3)]

Packaging: Socket AM3 938-pin organic micro pin grid array (micro-PGA)

Fab location: GLOBALFOUNDARIES Fab 1 module 1 in Dresden, Germany (formerly AMD Fab 36)

Process Technology: 45-nanometer DSL SOI (silicon-on-insulator) technology

Approximate Die Size: 169 mm2

Approximate Transistor count: ~300 million

Max Temp: 71o Celsius

Nominal Voltage: 0.925-1.425V

Max TDP: 95 Watts