14 DAY TRIAL // Advanced Micro Devices seems determined to update its entire line of Athlon II and Phenom II desktop processors before the first Bulldozer chips will come to market, and a recent report suggests that the company is now getting ready to release its fastest triple core processor to date, the Athlon II X3 460.
The new chip is expected to hit retail in just a few weeks time and it will join the Athlon II X4 650, Phenom II X4 850, the Phenom II X2 570 Black Edition and the Phenom II X4 980 Black Edition CPUs.
All these models will become the company's flagship SKUs in their respective product family after they become official, but, otherwise, pack the same features as their predecessors.
This is also the case with the Athlon II X3 460, which is based on the same Rana core used by all the other AMD tri-core solutions.
Rana chips are derived from the Propus architecture, but have one of their processing cores disabled, and lack any sort of Level 3 cache.
They do, however, feature 1.5MB of L2 cache (512KB per core), an integrated DDR2 and DDR3 memory controller and HyperTransport 3.0 support.
As its name implies, the new CPU would become the fastest triple-core Athlon II model available in AMD's lineup as it will be clocked at 3.5GHz, 200MHz above the operating frequency of the current Athlon II X3 455.
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.
No specific details about the price of the Athlon II X3 460 are available at this time, but this is expected to retail for less than 100 USD. The X3 455 processor this chip replaces is priced right now at $89.99.