While everybody is keenly awaiting AMD to release the first Bulldozer and Llano processors to market, the Sunnyvale-based company is hard at work developing new processors built on the current Daneb and Propus architectures and one of these upcoming CPUs is the Athlon II X4 650 which is expected to arrive in a few weeks’ time.
The first rumors about the X4 650 made their appearance in the summer of last year and it now seems like AMD is finally ready to launch the chip into the market.
Just as its name implies, the new CPU would become the fastest quad-core Athlon II model in AMD's lineup as it will be clocked at 3.2GHz. In comparison, AMD's fastest Athlon II X4 chip currently available, the 640, is clocked at 3GHz.
Otherwise, the two
processors are virtually identical as they both are based on the Propus architecture which packs 2MB of L2 cache (512KB per core), an integrated DDR2 and DDR3 memory controller and HyperTransport 3.0 support.
The processor is built using the 45nm SOI technology by Globalfoundries and, according to
Donanim Haber, it should feature the same 95W TDP as its predecessors.
Pricing should also be similar, as the Athlon II X4 650 is expected to cost 100 Euros at launch. This could drop even further once the first desktop
Llano APUs become available.
The Athlon II X4 650 is just one of the four flagship processors that AMD plans to release in the coming months, as the company is also working on the
Phenom II X4 850, the Phenom II X2 570 Black Edition and the Phenom II X4 980 Black Edition.
All these feature just slightly improved clock speeds in comparison with their predecessors, so their performance shouldn't hold any surprises, but it will be interesting to see how AMD adjusts the prices of its current CPUs after the newcomers arrive.
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