AMD Athlon X4 845 Review: Excavator digs AMD out from under Intel

There was a time (back in the days of overheating Pentium 4 processors) when the PC industry believed that AMD and its family of high-performance, high-value processors would replace Intel as principal manufacturer of CPUs. More than a decade later AMD has been largely eclipsed by the market successes of Intel and several generations of it's Core-series processors. But while Intel has focused on pushing for faster clock speeds and delivering lower power consumption by moving to a 14nm architecture, AMD has quietly been optimizing its 28nm architecture to deliver similar power efficiency and greater performance per watt in the entry-level and "mainstream" PC market.

This is where AMD's Athlon x4 845 and the new "Excavator" architecture made the equivalent of a stealth bomber attack against Intel earlier this year. The new Excavator cores won't compete with the newest high-end Intel Core i7 chips, but AMD might have just found a way to bury Intel's budget-priced Pentium line.

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