AMD fans have all reasons to be happy, as the time for the release of K10 draws near. The long wait will be over soon and all those who are sick and tired of the old, cheap and slow K8 will be able to jump in the K10 speed boat. Because K10 will come out much later than Intel's processors against which it competes, it should be a much better piece of hardware to be able to regain for AMD the lost fans and market shares and maybe, just maybe it will be able to save the company from impending doom as revenues drop and research and development costs rise.

There is news that the mainboard manufactures and computer systems integrators are receiving AM2+ Engineering Samples from AMD to test the new K10 quad core processor named Agena. These Engineering Samples processors will run on the so-called compatible Nvidia NF520 and NF560 chipsets, until the chipset RD790, especially designed for it, will be released. Because of the fact that both Nvidia NF520 and NF560 chipsets use only the version one of the Hypertransport technology and because K10 processors are designed for version 3, we won't be able to see the real performance of these processors until the arrival of the RD790 chipset.

Based on the codes on the processors in the leaked pictures it seems that K10 will start shipping to system integrators and retail dealer sometime in August. The underside of the K10 Agena looks very much as the older K8s based on the AM2 socket.

Based on the fact that Agena will be out in August and on the data inscribed on the surface of the Engineering Samples processors a number of extrapolations can be made. Fist of all the OPN code is different from the one used for AM2 CPUs as it has ZD instead of AD or SD. A code "160" and one "180" might mean the real clock frequency of the processors, most likely 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz. There is the string "110J4BGA", 110,J,4,BGA, J would mean the packaging type. It was used for the AM2 socket, so J should be AM2+. The "4" should mean L2 cache, which means 512K L2. Agena quadcore L2 is 2MB, thus 512Kx4=2MB. The "110" might be the voltage. But what about 1.10v? They are just predictions.