Intel Reveals Its $72 Unlocked Pentium: An AMD Killer?

Intel has been eternally criticised for not offering unlocked processors at lower price points. In the past this has lent a lifeline to AMD who have been able to keep a fairly strong grip on the low-mid range enthusiast CPU market by offering overclockable CPUs for low budgets. Now Intel is looking to claim that market back by offering up its newest unlocked Pentium processor: the Intel Pentium Anniversary Edition, or the Pentium G3258. With a 3.2GHz base speed the out of the box performance won’t be that great, but with overclocking there’s going to be potential to reach 4.2, 4.4GHz or maybe even 4.6/4.8/5GHz depending on how good each chip is. This all comes in at an impressive $72 MSRP.

At that $72 price point AMD offers its Athlon X4 750K Trinity FM2 CPU and I have a sneaky feeling the unlocked Pentium will perform broadly better as most applications still only take advantage of one or two threads – especially games. In most multi-threaded applications the AMD processor should pull ahead. However, we’ll have to wait and see what the reviews show and hopefully we’ll have a review of our own coming so stay tuned for that!

Source: Intel

Images courtesy of Intel