14 DAY TRIAL // As newer and better hardware products emerge, older-generation ones steadily drift into the background before ceasing to be manufactured altogether, and this seems to be exactly what AMD's Phenom II CPUs are about to experience.
As end users may or may not know by now, Advanced Micro Devices has successfully launched the A-Series Fusion Llano APUs.
As mainstream accelerated processing units, they are, naturally, going to replace the previous generation of units, much in the same way as mainstream and low-end graphics boards will drop in sales now that integrated mainstream-level graphics are found in such processors.
That said, the most recent report in regards to this issue says that the Sunnyvale, California-based company will start phasing out the Phenom II line first.
Initially, the plan was to totally phase them out by the third quarter of 2011, but since the FX and A-Series came forth about one quarter later than intended, the plan may have also been delayed by just as long.
The company is also said to have decided on phasing out the E-240 APU, as it will be replaced by the dual-core E-300 in Q3.
Soon enough, the E-450 will arrive as well, but the E-350, which it will replace, will only start to drift out of the picture next year, in the first three-month period.
For those that want to know, the E-450 isn't very fast compared to the E-350 (it has only an advantage of 50 MHz) but its graphics core is superior, as is the DDR3 controller (supports DDR3 1333MHz).
Meanwhile, Athlon II units have been giving up their turf to the newer-generation hardware as well and, much like the Phenom II, should completely disappear by the fourth quarter.
All in all, Socket AM3 central processing units will soon be a thing of the past, at least as far as sales channels go.