14 DAY TRIAL // According to the latest news on the web, Advanced Micro Devices' upcoming Phenom II processors have already appeared at online retailers, although the company has not officially introduced them yet. The new Phenom II X4 920, which runs at 2.8GHz and the Phenom II X4 940 running at 3GHz are displayed at prices ranging from $271 to $317 for the former and $304 to $373 for the latter. The chips come with 8MB of cache and work on DDR2 platforms.
As previously reported, AMD plans to introduce the chips at CES 2009, on January 8. These are the first chips from its new Phenom II lineup of central processing units based on the Deneb core. The first chips of the series will be compatible with the already existing AM2+ chipsets, but the chip maker announced that future parts would also have support for the upcoming AM3 platform, which would work with DDR3 memory modules.
The Sunnyvale based company is also reported to plan on releasing new CPUs under its Athlon brand name. The chips will be manufactured under the 45nm process technology, and, according to the news, we will see six such parts launched during the first half of the next year. It seems that AMD plans on releasing the fresh quad-core Athlon X4 615 and 605, as well as the triple-core Athlon X3 420 and 410 sometime in April, while also preparing dual-core Athlon X2 240 and 235 for June 2009.
In addition, AMD has already started to plan the phasing out of the upcoming 45nm AM2+ Phenom II X4 920 and 940 Black Edition CPUs. Since the chips will only mark a transition phase to the AM3 parts, the company is said to issue the last order notice for the chips in May next year. Moreover, starting with this month, AMD stopped taking orders for the Phenom X4 9650 CPU. The news also states that the company will issue last order notice for the Phenom X4 9950 (140W) and 9850 (125W) in March 2009, while doing the same for the Phenom X4 9750, 9850 (95W) and 9950 (125W) in June.
AMD has already started phasing out triple-core Phenom X3 8450 and 8550 CPUs, and is said to plan scheduling last order notice for Phenom X3 8650 and Phenom X3 8850 and 8750 for March and June. Also in March, the low-power Athlon X2 4450e CPU will see its last order notice issued.