We are officially declaring May 11, 2010 "Athlon II" day. Why you ask? Because AMD is launching a total of six new Athlon II processors today, including a new flagship model, targeted squarely at budget conscious consumers. We should point out, however, that all six of the processors launching today feature existing core microarchitectures. While they do differ from previous offerings in terms of frequency, and of course their model names, all of the new Athlon II processors arriving today are based on the same Propus (X4), Regor (X2), and Rana (X3) cores that were introduced a few months back.

We got our hands on the new flagship Athlon II X4, the 3.0GHz Athlon II X4 640, and have its performance results posted on the pages ahead...

he low-power Athlon II X4 610e, like its brothers, really shines in rendering and general computing at the 45W mark.

Despite being aimed at a more budget minded crowd, the AMD Athlon II X4 640 performs like a champ. Pair it with a system board like the ASRock 890GX Extreme3 that we used today and you have the base for a solid gaming or multi-media system. Not bad, considering the system would support dual-monitors, Blu-Ray playback, GPGPU applications like stream and most importantly it would be ready for Windows 7...

Not long after the introduction of its Phenom II X6 six-core processors, AMD has decided to freshen up its lower-end Athlon II lineup with a series of speed increases today. Conspicuous by its absence, though, is the widely rumored quad-core part based on Thuban silicon, the Phenom II X4 960T, which we can confirm won't be seeing the light of day now or in the near future.

The AMD Athlon II X4 640 will replace their current Athlon II X4 635 processor in price and with increased performance. The Athlon II X4 640 is rated 100MHz higher at 3.0GHz and still offers quad core performance. The 640 retains all of the AMD features, such as Cool and Quiet, to keep power consumption and heat to a minimum. I will be complementing the AMD Athlon II X4 640 with their new 890 motherboard chipset and an ATI Radeon 5770 for optimal compatibility and performance for a mainstream computer.

Now, if you already have the last generation Athlon II X4 635, then I suggest you keep it. It's not worth paying extra for a little performance increase. Now if you are looking for a solid, low cost, quad core for your HTPC or workstation, then you cannot go wrong with the Athlon II X4 640 processor. At that price, you could build a complete system for what one of the more "high end" CPUs go for.