AMD kills Athlon?
Athlon has always been “The Pentium of AMD”. But this situation is about to change: it seems Advanced Micro Devices has decided to retire the old and well-known Athlon brand in favor of a new and improved one: Phenom.
Intel has used this marketing technique in case of its processors: the old Pentium brand has been replaced by Core, and we all got used to it very quickly. Now Intel processors are not Pentium any more: single-core products are called Core Solo, dual-core ones are called Core 2 Duo, and quad-core ones are called… (you guessed it!) Core 2 Quad.
AMD is going to do something similar: the new Phenom processors (based on the yet-to-be-released K10 core) will be called like this: Phenom FX (for servers), Phenom X2 (dual-core desktop processor) and Phenom X4 (quad-core server processors). AMD also drops the xxxx+ markings, so the performance of the Phenom processors will be marked only by four numeric characters.
For example: AMD Phenom X4 2500 will be a quad-core desktop processor with an effective speed of 2.5 GHz and based on Agena (K10) core.
Rest in peace, Athlon. It was fun while it lasted, but new times call for new names.
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