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AMD updates public roadmap

New desktop, mobile server CPUs for 2005

AMD has updated its public processor roadmap, adding a host of new desktop and server products and fleshing out its plans for more notebook-friendly mobile Athlon 64 chips that its current line-up.

The new chart also clarifies the positioning of a number of products that had already appeared on internal roadmaps. 'San Diego' first emerged earlier this year as the 90nm successor to the current generation of 130nm Athlon 64 chips. AMD is now marking the part down as the follow-up to the Athlon 64 FX and has it scheduled for a H2 2004 release, as per our earlier story. San Diego is a 939-pin part with 1MB of L2 cache.

San Diego will ship in the same broad timeframe as 'Winchester', the 90nm, 939-pin successor to today's Athlon 64. During the first half of next year, AMD will ship the 130nm 'Newcastle', which bridges the gap between the current Athlon 64s and Winchester.

That's the official line: as we reported earlier, Newcastle is expected to ship in both single memory channel 754- and dual-channel 939-pin versions. Like Winchester, it is believed to contain only 512KB of L2 cache, leaving only the FX line with the same 1MB as today's Athlon 64s sport. AMD officials yesterday admitted that Newcastle's die-size is 150sq. mm, less than the Athlon 64's 193sq. mm size, suggesting that it does indeed feature less cache memory.

While AMD has Newcastle publicly scheduled for H1 2004, other sources have it pegged specifically to Q2 next year.

AMD's new roadmap confirms that 'Paris', the 130nm part based on the Athlon 64 architecture, will succeed today's Athlon XP line, sometime during the second half of 2004. That suggests it will indeed be a crippled version of the K8 architecture, with AMD64 technology disabled. AMD did not confirm that it will ship with just 256KB of L2 cache.

Where Paris was once scheduled to be succeeded in turn by the 90nm 'Victoria', that part has fallen off the roadmap. Beyond Paris lies the 90nm 'Palermo', due to ship during H2 2005. In the same timeframe, AMD will ship 'Toledo', the follow-up to San Diego. None of these chips are based on the K9 architecture, which will not emerge until the very end of 2005, AMD officials said yesterday.

In the mobile space, AMD will ship a part branded the 'Mobile Athlon 64'. Its spec. isn't known, but it's likely to be the 754-pin, single-channel Newcastle. It will be succeeded by the 90nm 'Odessa' chip during the second half of the year, which itself will be replaced by the 90nm 'Oakville' during H1 2005. How Oakville differs from Odessa isn't yet known.

The mobile version of Paris, 'Dublin' will ship in H2 2004, followed by the 90nm 'Trinidad' in H2 2005. Again, these mobile parts extend the Athlon XP-M line and are likely to offer only 32-bit processing.

The Opteron family will go to 90nm in H2 2004, as 'Venus' for one-way machines, 'Troy' for dualies and the already-outlined 'Athens' for four- to eight-way systems. All three will be offered as low-power versions alongside the standard releases.

Come H2 2005, and these three chips will be replaced by 'Denmark', 'Italy' and 'Egypt', respectively. ®

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