14 DAY TRIAL // In the fourth quarter of this year, AMD plans to discontinue most of its 45nm products released into the popular Athlon II, Phenom II and Sempron product families, as the company will focus its attention on the A- and E-Series APUs as well as on the upcoming FX-Series processor line.
AMD 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, or 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 the company, at the end of Q3 2011, AM3 processors should account for around 40% to 45% of the chip maker'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.
Athlon will be the only brand to survive from the three scheduled for retirement, since CPU-World reports AMD will release a series on new processors into this product line that will be based on the Llano architecture with a disabled graphics core.
The first such processor to arrive, the Athlon II X4 631, is already available in a wide range of OEM system, but the FM1 Athlon lineup is expected to spawn other similar models like the Athlon II X4 641 or Athlon II X2 221.