Today AMD introduces what might turn out to be the ideal budget CPU, with three cores for multi-threading, a relatively high 2.9 GHz clock speed, and an impressive sub-$90 price tag. How does it stand up to the rest of the company's Athlon and Phenom IIs?

After the launch of the Athlon II X2 and Athlon II X4 CPUs, it would be difficult to feign surprise at the introduction of the new Athlon II X3. We all knew it was coming, we even mentioned the upcoming X3 flavor of Athlon II in our Athlon II X4 620 launch story.
While the shock and awe might have been spoiled, the Athlon II X3 certainly isn't. AMD's vanguard model is the Athlon II X3 435, and it combines two very compelling components: a relatively high clock speed of 2.9 GHz (that's 100 MHz faster than the top-of-the-line Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition), and a relatively low MSRP of $87.
AMD already has the sub-$120 CPU market sewn up with a glut of Athlon IIs and Phenom II X2s and X3s, but at under $90, does the new Athlon II X3 435 offer the best value in the bunch? Let's find out.
- Introduction
- The 'New' Athlon II X3
- AMD Adds Low-Power CPUs To The Lineup
- Overclocking The Athlon II X3 435
- Test System And Benchmarks
- Synthetic Benchmarks
- Application Benchmarks: Media Encoding
- Application Benchmarks: 2D And 3D Graphics Processing
- Application Benchmarks: Productivity
- Game Benchmarks
- Multitasking Benchmarks
- Power Consumption Benchmarks
- Conclusion
2 cores 2 threads?
Aha! Thanks for catching that. After I had done the testing I was playing around with disabling CPU cores in the OS, and I forgot to turn them back on to take the screenshot. Fixed!
- the dictionary doesn't have to be called from RAM on every new data page, which frees memory bandwidth
- when the dictionary is half the size of cache, then uncompressed data can fit in cache too, thus actual compression doesn't need 'paging' from memory.
As an example, the PKZIP algorithm (used in .zip files) has a fixed dictionary size of 64 kb; .zip can't handle solid file compression either (the same algorithm can be found in gzip, but when used with the tar archiver, can in essence achieve solid file archiving, which can yield non negligible compression improvements).
In 7-zip, when creating the archive, try setting up the dictionary at a size lower than half the biggest consolidated cache the least gifted CPU has, and compare again: performance will in fact be rather close. However, if you go over the cache's size, performance plummets.
About AVG appreciating core counts better than CPU speed: this could be explained by how I/O intensive a virus scan is; and since Vista sucks at I/O, what's left to compare are how many file handles can be opened and used simultaneously. A test that could be done:
- Install AVG on Vista, XP and Linux
- Run a scan on the same file set (be mindful though that the Linux file set should be put on an ext3 filesystem, NTFS access still being rather CPU intensive on Linux)
- see if there are differences.
even an atom netbook can do 2 thread simultaneously.
I really hope they get their act together and hit Intel hard on their flagships just as they did with Nvidia.
Nice article by the way and I haven't even gotten to the benchmarks.
Looking at the gaming benchmarks I'm impressed.