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...