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The Baby Quads are probably just what AMD needs. In the current economy, everybody is increasingly cost-conscious and the US$ 99.- offering of the Athlon II X4 fits that bill perfectly. Never has a quad core CPU be more affordable than now, moreover, there are inexpensive motherboards out there that support the Baby Quads (along with any other high-end offering from AMD).
The half-cache design in combination with the absence of the L3 was something we were a bit skeptic about and of course, there are some drawbacks to that design. On the other hand, there are cost savings, not only on the wafer side of things but also with respect to total cost of ownership since the Baby Quads are setting new standards in energy efficiency - at least with respect to the isolated CPU power. Clearly, that means that AMD has some work cut out to port the same power efficiency to the rest of the platform, where things are still a bit behind the "blue" competition but the switches seem to be set in the right direction.
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