When AMD had released its phenom 2 series of processors, it was a pretty good performance upgrade from the original Phenom series of processors. Recently, they had released Phenom 2 dual cores and athlon 2 dual cores. All of these were very competitive with Intel's line-up. Now, AMD will release its Athlon 2 X4 series. They will be very sold as very affordable quad core processors at prices as low as $85. Thats a lot cheaper than intel's E7400 , their 2.8Ghz dual core processor. These Athlon 2 quads will have a TDP of 95W and will not have L3 cache. The 2 models will be clocked at 2.6GHz and 2.8Ghz and will have 2MB of L2 cache. Thats a pretty good deal, specially when Intel's cheapest quad core is a lot more expensive.

Since there is no L3 cache, the performance will take a major hit in applications like video encoding and gaming, but then, its at a price of a dual core, this is a deal that you can just not miss.

Apart from the dual cores, there will be tri cores, which should be priced near the pentium dual cores and will give them a hard time in the entry level segment as these have an extra core(and maybe you can unlock an extra core).

They will also release energy efficient quads rated 45W TDP. They will be clocked at 2.2GHz and 2.3GHz. They will be good for HTPCs.

These processors should be released in september and should make AMD's hold in the entry level market even stronger. Expect some new products and some price cuts from Intel too.

Update: These processors have received a very good responds from the market , specially the Athlon 2 620 as it provides really good value for money. Even the tri core athons are very good, let us see intel's answer when they release their core i3 series of processors in Q1 2010.