AT News Update: Athlon 64 name revisions

Hopefully you got a chance to check out our roadmap updates over the last several months; particularly our AMD 2004 roadmap forecast. It is not unusual for supplements for these roadmaps to show up several months later, particularly with product naming. Below you can see that we have updated our Socket 939 Roadmap as AMD has changed the names of two of its upcoming processors.

Correction: There was a Typo in our original roadmap. The Socket 939 FX-55 does not have a release date yet. FX-53 for Socket 940 has a release date planned for March, and FX-53 for Socket 939 has a release date planned for May.

According to the roadmaps, the Athlon 64 3700+ on Socket 939 has been renamed to Athlon 64 3800+. Athlon 64 3400+ has been renamed to Athlon 64 3500+. Notice these changes are effective on the Socket 939 platform only. "The innuendo is that equivalently clocked Athlon 64s will perform better on Socket 939".

However, the updated roadmap has a few surprises in store for Socket 754 as well. First of all, there has been the addition of Athlon XP 3200+ for socket 754. Athlon 64 2800+ will begin showing up very soon as the roadmap simply states Q1 for the release date. Since AMD has planned more Socket 754 processors (albeit budget oriented) the architecture is beginning to look much more forward looking than many originally expected. As we pointed out in the previous roadmap, the Athlon XP chips on the Socket 754 interface have a reduced cache and only run in 32-bit mode.

Of course the largest issue here is why the changes in the Socket 939 processors were made. It seems plausible that a new instruction set addition or optimization may give the Newcastle processors better performance than originally anticipated. Or perhaps the real answer is more mundane; AMD may have just renamed the processors to avoid confusion between Socket 939 and Socket 754.

Regrettably even though we know SSE3 instructions are set to start showing up on Athlon 64, AMD officials could not confirm upcoming release schedules for the technology.