In the fourth quarter of this year, AMD plans to discontinue all products released into the popular Athlon II, Phenom II and Sempron product families, as the company will focus on its A and E-Series APUs as well as on the upcoming FX-Series processor line.
AMD recently notified its partners that the last orders for Athlon II, Phenom II and Sempron CPUs are due in Q4 2011, while shipments will continue for a quarter or two afterwards, as long as supplies last.
For end-users this means that the
processors will gradually disappear from the market, including retail stores and OEM systems.
These will be replaced by E-Series and A-Series accelerated processing units as well as by AMD's upcoming line of FX CPUs that are based on the Bulldozer architecture.
According to estimates provided by
Xbit Labs, from sources familiar with AMD's plans, AM3 processors should account for around 40% to 45% of the company's total desktop processors shipments.
However, this value is expected to fall in the fourth quarter of this year to roughly 10% - 15%, as the company will release more APU models and the
FX-Series chips into the market.
As a result,
AMD expects the share of FM1 (Llano) accelerated processing units to raise to 45% - 50%, while the shares of AM3+ (FX-series) and FT1 (E-series) chips will be around 20% each.
Of all the brands that AMD plans to retire this year, Athlon was the most successful, as it spanned an impressive number of architecture since it was first introduced in mid-1999.
One of the most important moments in the brand's history was the introduction of the AMD K8 architecture, which gave AMD a substantial advantage in its fight against Intel.
After AMD retires the Athlon II, Phenom II and Sempron product families from its offer, the only branded processors sold by the company will be the AMD Opteron server chips.
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