14 DAY TRIAL // According to the latest news on the Web, the world's second largest chip manufacturer, Advanced Micro Devices, is planning to bring back to life its well known Athlon brand with the revamped K10 micro-architecture. It seems that the almost ten year old brand will see new addition as soon as April 2009, and we're talking chips ranging from dual to quad cores.
Sources within the chip maker have stated that the Sunnyvale company plans to use the Athlon brand name for new processors based on the upcoming code-named Propus, Rana and Regor cores, and that the new chips would be manufactured under the 45nm fabrication process. While prolonging the life of the brand, the move is also expected to attract the attention of those that once saw the Athlon and Athlon 64 chips as leading on the performance side.
The Propus core will be spotted in the AMD Athlon X4 600-series of quad-core processors that will feature dual-channel DDR2/DDR3 memory controller, as well as 2MB L2 cache (512KB per core). Around the Rana core, AMD is stated to plan building the Athlon X3 400-series of triple-core CPUs which, depending on the packaging, will sport DDR2/DDR3 memory controller, and have 1.5MB L2 cache. The AMD Athlon X2 200-series chips will be based on the company's Regor core. The lineup includes dual-core processors with DDR2/DDR3 support and 1MB of cache.
According to the same news, the quad- and triple-core AMD Athlon X4 and Athlon X3 chips are expected to hit the market in April 2009, while the dual core Athlon X2 should come in June next year. The fresh Athlon chips are expected to feature core frequencies of 2.70GHz – 2.80GHz. No information on the pricing of the new chips has been unveiled, yet they are expected to come as rather affordable products, based on the fact that the currently available Athlon processors are rather inexpensive.
AMD has made no official statement on the news story.