Athlon II

In addition to its new Opteron chips, AMD yesterday announced a few small changes to its processor line-up, including adjusted prices for several of its Llano-based APUs (and one of its FX-series socket AM3+ processors) and a new, faster GPU-less Athlon II for Socket FM1 boards. The Athlon II X4 651 is a 3 GHz quad-core chip with a 100 watt TDP and 4 MB of L2 cache, and a suggested retail price of $92. For people building an FM1-based system with no need for an integrated GPU, it will deliver slighly faster performance than the 2.9 GHz, ~$140 A8-3850 at a lower cost. It differs from the already available Athlon II X4 631 only in cost and clock speed. As for the price changes, they...