Saturday, August 6, 2011

AMD to Revive Athlon II and Sempron Product Lines with New Llano APUs

Earlier this year we reported that AMD plans to retire its longstanding Athlon II and Sempron brands completely from the processor market, but it now seems like the Sunnyvale-based company is interested in giving these names a new lease of life with the introduction of new chips based on the Llano architecture.

This information was provided by the CPU-World website, which noticed four new Athlon II and Sempron processors in Biostar's CPU support list for socket FM1 motherboards.

The first chips that we encounter are the AMD Athlon II X4 631X and X4 641X, which, just as their name suggests, pack four processing cores.

These are clocked at 2.6 GHz and 2.8 GHz, respectively, while the TDP of both CPU models is listed at 100W.

The two other chips to make their appearance, the Sempron 198X and Athlon II 221X, are dual-core processors with a TDP of 65 Watt and operate at 2.5GHz and 2.8GHz, respectively.

According to their part numbers, these last two chips come equipped with 512KB Level 2 cache per core, while their more powerful quad-core brothers have their cache increased to 1MB per core.

Judging by the designations used for the Athlon II series processors, these chips will only be released into the OEM market. No information regarding pricing or availability was made public until now.

By the end of this year, AMD is expected to launch five other Llano APUs, including the top of the line A8-3870 Black Edition chip that will feature an unlocked multiplier, 3.1GHz quad processing cores with 4MB of Level 2 cache memory, an integrated dual-channel DDR3-1866MHz controller, and Radeon HD 6550D graphics.

Currently, depending on the feature set, Llano accelerated processing units are branded as “A-Series” or “E-Series” parts, while the upcoming desktop Bulldozer processors will be released into the FX-Series.