It looks like Advanced Micro Devices won't be sacrificing every product brand this year, as the Athlon II series of CPUs will live on, even gaining socket FM2 members.
The folks at
CPU World have discovered three Athlon II X4 central processing units that will be compatible with the FM2 socket.
We'd be lying if we didn't say this was at least a minor surprise. After hearing that the Phenom II line
won't last the year, we were worried the Athlon II brand would suffer some untimely demise as well.
Then again, Phenom II was a high-end desktop line, and AMD doesn't expect, or intend, to compete with Intel there for a while. As such, letting the brand die until they have the technology to revive it, if ever, actually makes a morbid kind of sense.
At any rate, the Athlon II brand will continue from the FM1 platform into FM2, and we know of three models at the moment: Athlon II X4 730, 740 and 750K.
All of them are based on Piledriver and have four cores and L2 cache of 4 MB. The thermal design power and clock speeds are different though.
The Athlon II X4 730, as the slowest, works at 2.8 GHz and needs 65 W of power.
The Athlon II X4 740 is faster, at 3.2 GHz, but makes do with the same amount of energy.
As for the Athlon II X4 750K, it is a 3.4 GHz quad-core chip with a power requirement of 100 Watts.
There is no precise word on whether or not the Athlons will have integrated GPUs, but probability leans towards a “no.” The Athlon II with “Llano” cores had their on-chip GPUs disabled after all.
On the flip side, the processors could possess Turbo Core Technology. We'll have to wait for their launch for the confirmation and higher frequencies though, or lack thereof. Alas, the ETA is just as unknown, as is the answer to the question if the chips will be available through retail or just to PC OEMs.
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