http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3638
Pretty excited about these little guys. Now even ~$400 PC builds don’t have to compromise with regards to the number of cores you get. Drop this on a ~$50-$90 motherboard and you’ll get a really good experience for not much dough. Some games don’t run the fastest on this CPU as stated in Anands’ article, but performance is quite acceptable. Realistically, AMD owns the cheap (~$40), decent (~$65) and reasonable (~$100) price points at this juncture. Clearly Intel takes the lead once you start getting around $200 for the CPU alone, but the platform costs will also be significantly higher.
It will be interesting to see how quickly bios updates roll out (if they are even needed…), but other than that it seems a pretty clear winner.
At the very least, it is another reason to be happy that AMD is still in the game.
–Nat