Xbitlabs has reported that Athlon 64 3400+ has begun to show up.Athlon 64
3400+ is a single channel processor with a speed of 2.2GHz and a L2 cache of 1MB.
After a quick look on the Internet I saw that it is soon in on the shelves in some Scandinavian stores for example itbutikken.dk. This means that the processor is coming soon. Xbitlabs guesses that it will be launched now this Monday the 5th, 12th or 19th.
Xbitlabs has also got some rumours. They say that socket 754 like socket 940 is dying, and that there will only be two more processors to come, 3400+ and 3700+, where the last mentioned will come in Q2 this year.
Athlon 64 on the other hand does not die like socket 754, instead Athlon 64 does as its brother Athlon 64 FX a move to socket 939. In the future both the brothers will have dual channel, The only difference between the two will be the L2 cache’s size. Athlon 64 will have half of Athlon 64 FX’s 1MB (namely 512KB).
– Why is AMD doing like this?
Of two reasons:
1. Cache memory is expensive and it troubles the manufacturing process.
2. By using the same architecture on both of the processors the machines that manufacture the processors will not differ much.
AMD will thereby because of these two reasons be able to produce processors in a very effective way.
Already now there is a processor architecture where only the size of the L2 cache is the difference, I’m thinking of Duron and Athlon XP.
But there are also very small differences between the Celeron and the Pentium 4, if you compare the architecture.
At last remember that this is only rumours, AMD has not commented this officially and yet there is time for many changes to happen.
Read more here.
