It doesn’t always have to be fancy words. In fact it can be numbers. "Ninety-nine dollars... " for example. Fact of the matter is that AMD has released last week the first quad core CPU running at a double-digit price tag, something that can be hidden amongst the grocery and weekly gas entries on the credit card bill without sticking out that one extra number that instantly raises some questions. Oh yea.. that's what it was: "Ninety-nine dollars... "

Needless to say that in the European market or in the UK, that "ninety-nine dollars... " number is kind of lost but people in the old world are not using credit cards as much, and cheque cards abide by slightly different rules anyway.

Old-world considerations aside, four cores were never as affordable as now and maybe Intel holds the performance crown in the high-end sector and also has a killer product with the Atom in the low end but here is the absolute king of the value proposition: four cores for ninety-nine dollars... . Enter the Athlon II X4 620!

One thing generally totally underappreciated by the press and analyst community is the effort that goes into the release of a new product, and I am talking about “new product” here, not just a re-spin or re-badge of an existing product. As long as we can talk bad about it …

Seriously, it is hard to imagine the amount of work that goes into a new silicon; man hours are in the hundreds of thousands, even if existing libraries of design modules are included, and when the first wafers come off the line, there is that brief moment of anxiety whether everything is working, followed by about 5 minutes of celebration. And then it’s back to business as usual. This is just something that needed to be said, a small tribute to everybody (including Dan) who has been involved in getting modern CPUs to where they are now.