AMD Athlon II X2 255 vs Intel Xeon E3-1270

Let's find out which one of Intel Xeon E3-1270 and AMD Athlon II X2 255 is of a more recent generation, and what segment it belongs to.

• Name
  Intel Xeon E3-1270 AMD Athlon II X2 255
• Family
  Intel Xeon E3 AMD Athlon II
• CPU group
  Intel Xeon E3 AMD Athlon II X2 (Propus)
• Segment
  Desktop / Server Desktop / Server
• Generation
  2 1

In this block we are going to compare Intel Xeon E3-1270 vs AMD Athlon II X2 255 by main technical specifications: number of cores and threads, base and maximum frequencies, process technology and cache size. The higher these specifications are, the more powerful your CPU will be.

• CPU Cores / Threads
  4 / 8 2 / 2
• Core architecture
  normal normal
• Cores
  4x 2x
• Hyperthreading / SMT
  Yes No
• Overclocking
  No No
• Frequency
  3.40 GHz 3.10 GHz
• Turbo Frequency (1 Core)
  3.80 GHz --

Common specifications for integrated graphics cards in Intel Xeon E3-1270 and AMD Athlon II X2 255 along with supported interfaces and connection options. This block has no effect on the final efficiency of the CPU.

• GPU name
  no iGPU no iGPU
• GPU (Turbo)
  No turbo No turbo

Let's compare the support of video codecs between Intel Xeon E3-1270 and AMD Athlon II X2 255. Hardware support of video decoding by embedded graphics cards directly affects the speed and quality of rendering videos.

• h265 / HEVC (8 bit)
  No No
• h265 / HEVC (10 bit)
  No No
• h264
  No No
• VP8
  No No
• VP9
  No No
• AV1
  No No
• AVC
  No No
• VC-1
  No No
• JPEG
  No No

To choose the best model between Intel Xeon E3-1270 and AMD Athlon II X2 255 you need to pay special attention to memory type, clock frequency, multi-channel features, and PCIe version. The higher these numbers are, the better your CPU will be. Keep in mind that the maximum memory and frequency may also depend on the model of the motherboard.

• Memory type
  DDR3-1333 DDR3-1333
• Max. Memory
  32 GB 16 GB
• Memory channels
  2 (Dual Channel) 2 (Dual Channel)
• ECC
  Yes No
• PCIe
  2.0 x 20 2.0
• AES-NI
  Yes No

Let's find out what TDP value would be better for Intel Xeon E3-1270 or AMD Athlon II X2 255? The Thermal Design Power (TDP) indicates the maximum amount of heat that should be dissipated by the chip cooling system. However, the value of TDP gives only a rough indication of the real power consumption of the CPU.

• TDP (PL1)
  80 W 65 W

Here you can find a comparison of 2nd and 3rd level cache sizes for Intel Xeon E3-1270 and AMD Athlon II X2 255 CPUs along with a list of ISA extensions.

• Technology
  32 nm 45 nm
• Chip design
  Monolithic
• Socket
  LGA 1155 AM3
• L2-Cache
  -- 2.00 MB
• L3-Cache
  8.00 MB --
• Architecture
  Sandy-Bridge Propus
• Operating systems
  Windows 10, Linux Windows 10, Linux
• Virtualization
  VT-x, VT-x EPT, VT-d AMD-V
• Instruction set (ISA)
  x86-64 (64 bit) x86-64 (64 bit)
• ISA extensions
  SSE4.1, SSE4.2, AVX MMX, 3DNow!, SSE3, SSE4a
• Release date
  Q2/2011 Q1/2010
• Release price
  339 $ --