AMD’s Athlon brand has had a variety of suffixes appended to it, including XP, 64, FX and X2, but AMD never tried calling any of its CPUs Athlon II, despite releasing an Athlon 4 mobile chip. However, the word is that this is soon going to change later this year, when AMD will apparently launch the Athlon II, continuing the numbering strategy that AMD used when it released the Phenom II.
Taiwanese tech site
DigiTimes reports that the Athlon II will form a part of a new entry-level desktop platform codenamed Pisces. According to the site, the platform will also take advantage of AMD’s 55nm 780G+ chipset, which will feature an integrated Radeon HD 4200 GPU.
DigiTimes cites Taiwanese motherboard partners as its source of the information, and says that the new platform is scheduled for release before September 2009. However, the site also says that motherboards based on the new chipset will be shown off at Taiwan’s Computex show in June.
As well as this, the site claims that the new Athlon II CPUs will be based on AMD’s forthcoming Propus, Rana and Regor cores. AMD hasn’t officially released any information about these cores yet, but
PC Online published some rumoured specifications of the cores last month. The site claims that Propus will be a quad-core Athlon-branded CPU with a total of 2MB of cache (L2 and L3). Meanwhile, the Rana chips were reported to feature three cores and a total of 1.5MB of cache (L2 and L3), and the Regor chips were alleged to have two cores.
Interestingly, PC Online refers to the chips as Athlon X4, Athlon X3 and Athlon X2, without referring to an Athlon II brand, and says that the first chips could be out later in April. Of course, the information you get from the grapevine will never be completely reliable, but it looks as though AMD may have some Athlon-branded quad-core and triple-core chips out later this year, whatever final name they’re given.
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