14 DAY TRIAL // Whether because of the holiday shopping season or tough competition, or both, Advanced Micro Devices has chosen to reduce the prices of no less than eighteen central processing and accelerated processing units.
The CPUs that are now cheaper than before are part of the Athlon II series. They have two, three and four cores.
The Athlon II X4 640 is the one that has received the largest price cut, going from $98 / 98 Euro to $67 / 67 Euro. That means that 31.6% of the price has been sheared off.
The Athlon II X2 265 got the second place, with a 30.4% cut, from $69 / 69 Euro to $48 / 48 Euro.
The other 10 should ship by 14.7% to 25% less than before, as can be seen in the table there on the left. If nothing else, the slashed tags will give prospective customers an extra reason to consider building a PC involving a motherboard equipped with the AM3 socket.
Compared to the Athlon II series, the A-Series of accelerated processing units has few price modifications, and they are quite small in comparison, with one exception.
The A4-3300, (2.5GHz, 65W, 1MB total dedicated L2 cache, Socket FM1) has gone from $46 / 46 Euro to $36 / 36 Euro – 21.7% downward adjustment.
A4-3400 (2.7GHz, 65W, 1MB total dedicated L2 cache, socket FM1) comes in second, with a drop of 16.7% (from $48 / 48 Euro to $40 / 40 Euro).
As for the other four accelerated processing units (A4-5300, A8-3870K, A8-3850 and A6-3670K) , they will sell for 3.7% to 11.3% less than before.
If anyone is wondering why AMD has not included the Athlon II X3 445 and X4 638 in its price list, the reason is simple enough: the chips have been discontinued. It is similar to what Intel has decided to do to the Atom Z670 and Core i5-3450S CPUs.
