AMD Preps 3.2GHz Athlon II X4 650 For Q4 Release

Even in the midst of the GeForce GTX 460 flood, market watchers still seem to find enough time to scour the underworld of the IT industry and uncover secrets related to what may or may not come to pass. On the graphics front, things have mostly revolved around the no longer upcoming aforementioned DirectX 11 card. That said, the attention has once again shifted towards the CPU market, and a report has arisen regarding a certain chip that AMD may eventually reveal.

With all the hype surrounding the Fusion architecture, Advanced Micro Devices hasn't exactly been able to prevent leaks about its upcoming chips. In fact, even processors that aren't Fusion have become the subject of attention. Fudzilla has been especially determined to get a hold of such info, and its latest report is sheer proof.

Apparently, AMD is getting ready to unveil something of a beast in terms of processing, as far as the Athlon series of CPUs is concerned. To be more specific, the Sunnyvale, California-based CPU and GPU developer will launch the Athlon II X4 650 sometime during the fourth quarter.

Two things are of note about this quad-core. For one, the frequency will reach 3.2GHz. The other feature is the TDP (thermal design power) of only 95W. Other specifications include 4 x 512KB cache memory per core and zero L3 cache.

According to Fudzilla, this processor will become a very strong presence among all other Propus-based chips and will be especially popular because it won't cost more than roughly 100 Euro / $100 at launch. Nevertheless, with Bulldozer and Fusion parts around the corner, one can wonder just how long-lived this Athlon II X4 650 will actually be. This dilemma will have to wait for a solution until next year, however, considering that neither of the more advanced architectures will come out before then.