AMD Athlon II X4 640 3.0GHz Quad Core Processor Review

Hyper Pi

Hyper Pi is a front end mod for Super Pi. Hyper Pi allows you to run multiple instances of Super Pi automatically without manually setting processor affinity. Super Pi is a utility that allows you to calculate between 16 thousand and 32 million decimal places of Pi. Pi was originally calculated to 33.5 million places using a Pentium 90MHz processor, 40MB of main memory, and 340MB of available storage. This system was able to calculate the 33.5 million digits within 3 days! Fortunately we are able to do it a little bit quicker today.

Benchmark Results: Clock speeds and memory bandwidth dominate when calculating Pi. The core I7 dominates the field here as it has a memory bandwidth that more than doubles the AMD field thanks to the triple channel architecture. When it comes to the AMD Athlon II X4 640 it fell just short of the AMD Athlon II X2 255 which has a slightly higher clock speed of 3.1GHz. The drawback to this benchmark is that it doesn’t take multi core performance into account. The Athlon II X2 255 runs two instances of Super Pi; the Athlon II X4 640, Athlon II X4 635 and Phenom II X4 910e all run 4 instances, and the Intel core I7 930 runs 8 instances of pi.