I have had an Athlon LE-1620 for about three or four months now, and it has been one of my favorite processors ever. The large 1mb L2 cache really seems to make the processor scream (for the budget sector) and after comparing benchmarks, the processor at stock speed (2.4ghz) comes out just about dead even with an overclocked Celeron 430 (1.8 ghz base speed, overclocked to 2.38ghz).
While AMD prices have started to go up (AMD is re-releasing older Athlon X2 models in new energy efficient models, and literally doubling the prices; the Athlon LE-1620 is still in production, but the price also has actually gone up a couple dollars since I purchased the chip in January), Intel prices have come down. For the same $45 I paid for the Athlon LE-1620, I can now purchase a new in box Celeron E1200, which is a dual core processor with 512K of L2 cache. This is really impressive, considering AMD has always been the cheaper of the two chipmakers.
I really enjoy the Athlon LE; the large 1mb L2 cache, very cool operating temperatures (I run the chip without a fan on, with Cool 'n Quiet enabled) and overclocking capabilities (If ever needed, the chip has no problem overclocking to 3ghz). At the same time, with the price of Intel dual core chips dropping it seems as if a move back to dual core country is imminent.
I'm in the process of building a computer for my future father in law for Father's Day. I bought several items off of eBay including a Celeron 420 (1.6ghz) for $15 and a Pentium Dual Core e2180 (2.0ghz) for $40. Right now, my plans are giving him the AMD LE-1620 and using the e2180 in my system (with the appropriate motherboards, of course).
I'm going to run various benchmarks between the two systems (the e2180 will be overclocked to either 2.4 ghz or 2.6 ghz) and see how they compare. For some reason, I really can't see how the Athlon LE-1620 is going to compare to a dual core Core based processor (since it was a very close match compared to a single core, Core based Celeron clocked @ 2.38 ghz with only 1/2 the L2 cache [On a side note, at stock speeds, the LE-1620 wipes the floor with a Celeron 430, and would probably destroy a 420 (1.6ghz)]).
AMD lost the performance sector, and it appears that it will be losing the budget sector very soon also.
