For those of you who watch the Athlon 64 market very closely, you may have noticed the sudden dry up of lower clocked E3 Venice CPUs. According to industry insiders, AMD appears to have discontinued shipping the Athlon 64 3000+ to major retailers, although AMD roadmaps predicted this far in advanced. However, sources have now indicated that AMD has also stopped shipping the Athlon 64 E3 Venice 3200+ and 3500+ Socket 939 processors too. Higher clocked Athlon 64 chips, like the 3800+, are in allocation.

The halted shipments of the Athlon 64 3200+ and 3500+ are a bit of a surprise to most merchants we've talked to. AMD is already phasing in new "E4" chips, and pre-orders are already cropping up at various merchants. The E4 stepping has generally been reserved for San Diego, Venus, and Troy cores in the past, but the new stepping may steal some of the limelight away from AMD's exceptional Opteron 939 Venus since only the cache sizes are different now. Our price engine has already picked up the Athlon 64 3200+ and the Athlon 64 3500+ E4:

AMD Athlon 64 (939) 3200+ 512KB Venice
AMD Athlon 64 (939) 3500+ 512KB Venice

The new E4 chips carry the "CG" code name in the SKU. For example, the new 3200+ retail kit is labeled as ADA3200CGBOX. Don't let this confuse you with the "CG" stepping of older Hammer SKUs; those were labeled as "AR" and "AS" in the OPN (SKU).
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  • DanDaMan315 - Saturday, December 3, 2005 - link

    They all max clocked to the same place anyways, it's a shame that the cheapest chip is EOL.
  • yacoub - Thursday, December 1, 2005 - link

    I guess that makes me less worried that I just got my 3200+ Venice core in the mail. I hope I'm not going to miss out on anything in the new E4 batch. =[
  • SuperSix - Wednesday, November 30, 2005 - link

    All Athlon64s are in HARD allocation. There's a decent amount of X2's in the channel, but the regular Athlon 64s below 3800+ are very hard to get, the market will be drying up pretty soon, we are backordered in the thousands on most Athlon64 PIBs.

    AMD announced to us (AMD Disty) months ago that the 3000+ were EOL, that they would only be shipping them to developing countries (huh?), and many AMD resellers got VERY angry @ AMD, got some small shipments, I see some on order, but whether or not we see any arrive.. I doubt.

    And AMD is courting Dell? Where are they going to get the fab capacity? They can't keep up now! (Unless the shortage are due to Dell allocating the processors? Hmmmm...)

  • Leper Messiah - Wednesday, November 30, 2005 - link

    You may have something there. First the sudden dry up of OEM chips, now the low end supply is drying up, hmm...either they're pushing for dual core REALLY hard, or they're stockpiling for something...FAB 36 is coming on line soon, so theoritically, they'd have enough production to give Dell some kind of large ammount of procs...

    E4 stepping eh. So these are exactly the same as manchesters, 'cept no core? Be very good OC'ers then...
  • 8NP4iN - Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - link

    Im confused
  • semo - Wednesday, November 30, 2005 - link

    welcome to the club. help yourself to some biscuits and liquor at the bar
  • A554SS1N - Monday, November 28, 2005 - link

    I thought a long time ago it was known that after the E3 stepping the E6 stepping was used for venices (BW code) (E4 being San Diego I think or Manchester..?) So I don't know how E4 fits in here - was this a typo?
  • ozzimark - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link

    perhaps he meant to say manchester based core? :)
  • MarkHark - Monday, November 28, 2005 - link

    ... Plus, I know what San Diego is, but WTF are Venus and Troy?
  • MarkHark - Monday, November 28, 2005 - link

    Also, is there any difference at all between Athlons and s939 Opterons?

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