14 DAY TRIAL // Advanced Micro Devices just resumed shipments of its single core central processing systems as the manufacturing company just released a new lot of Athlon LE processors which are aimed at entry level computer systems where a low price tag is more important than a high computing power level.
The new AMD Athlon LE processing units are now available in several stores around the world and users may purchase them under the Athlon LE-1600 and LE-1620 commercial names that are coming with a TDP rating of only 45 watts and 1MB of second level cache memory. The new processing units from AMD are using the same general marking that can be found on all recently released CPUs and they are expected to offer much higher performance when compared with the older Sempron LE class of computer chips as they are coming with increased running speeds.
While the AMD Athlon LE series of products will offer a performance boost over their Sempron counterparts, they will be also cheaper and slower than the dual core versions which were launched by AMD sometime ago. The new line of processing units will initially consist of only two processors, the Athlon LE-1620 that runs at a clock speed of 2.4GHz, while having 1MB of L2 cache memory. This processor uses the AM2 mainboard socket and so it is compatible at least in theory with the vast majority of AM2 motherboards that are out there.
The second new AMD processing unit is the Athlon LE-1600 that is coming with a slight lower operating speed of 2.2Ghz, while using the same cache memory, mainboard socket and TDP rating as its faster brother. According to the news site xbitlabs, the two AMD processors will be manufactured using the 90 nanometer fabrication process and they will also use the F3 stepping that was until now very widely used in AMD processing units from the single and dual core generations.
Even as all existing AMD Athlon 64 central processing units are coming with 512KB of L2 cache memory, the LE versions are listed as having 1MB of cache and if this turns out to be true, their performance level will not be so low after all. One possible explanation would be that the Les are in fact dual core processors with the second core disabled as well as half of the cache memory.
While the official price tags for the AMD Athlon LE processing units is not yet available, considering that the Athlon 64 solutions are now pretty cheap and generally under the $100 level, they will most likely hit the $70 mark, at least until AMD gets around and launches a faster version that could come at a higher price tag.