the low down on AMD's

[ROM-DOS]

AMD To Roll Out Low-Power Desktop CPUs

"AMD, Sunnyvale, Calif., will begin shipping production quantities of low-power Athlon and Sempron CPUs later this month or early next month, said David Schwartzbach, AMD's division marketing manager, desktops. The processors will be available in dual-core 64-bit models under the Athlon 64 X2 brand, single-core 64-bit models under the Athon 64 brand, and single-core 32-bit models under the Sempron brand."

"Those processors will be offered in an energy efficient line that will run at a thermal design point of 65 watts or an energy efficient small form factor option that will run at a thermal design point of 35 watts. AMD's current desktop processors have a thermal design point of 51 watts to 110 watts, depending on the model, according to specifications on its Web site. Schwartzbach said a typical desktop processor runs at about 89 watts."

Blurbing;

AMD has also lowered prices on several of its microprocessors. The price of certain Opteron processors, as well as Athlon XP and mobile Athlon CPUs, were lowered recently. AMD apparently does not feel any pressure to lower prices of Athlon 64 chips, which are selling briskly. AMD plans on launching 939-pin Athlon 64 CPUs at Comdex, which should occur in early June. The 939-pin versions should marginally increase processor speeds, and AMD will bump the processor models to reflect the higher speeds. These new CPU launches will probably be the last AMD desktop CPU introductions before 90 nanometer Athlon 64 CPUs are released in the fall. AMD has largely succeeded in its goal of substantially raising the Average Selling Price (ASP) of its processors and shouldn't need to drastically lower prices in the near future.

[Swimmer]

the phase out of 754 has been planned for a while and the time has finally come!  With the launch of AM2 in early June/late May the plan was to move all of the desktop processor to that platform and leave the 939 for the budget and low power chips..

[ROM-DOS]

Advanced Micro Devices will come out with a new chip architecture next year currently dubbed the Next Generation Processor Technology.

Chips built under the new AMD architecture will feature a faster version of HyperTransport, an input-output technology featured on AMD chips. HyperTransport 3.0, recently approved by the standards body that governs the development of the technology, will accomplish 5.2 gigatransfers (5.2 billion transfers of data) per second.

The new chips will also sport four processing cores.

One of the biggest changes will come in the caches, reservoirs of memory built into the processor for rapid data access. In current AMD chips, each core has two caches and those caches are completely dedicated to their respective cores. In future chips, each core will also have two dedicated caches, but the cores will also share a third cache. With the third cache, the processor will less often have to fetch data from main memory.

The integrated memory controller on the new chips will also connect to DDR2 memory and accommodate DDR3.

<img src="http://imagehouze.com/uploader/files/126/AMDNexGen.bmp" alt="AMDNexGen.bmp" />