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AMD dual-core Athlons 'sell out' in Tokyo

Big in Japan

AMD's dual-core desktop processor, the Athlon 64 X2, finally went on sale as packaged product for end-users yesterday, though supply may be tight.

A number of Tokyo computer shops were offering X2 chips rated at 4200+, 4600+ and 4800+ this weekend, according to local reports. The 4400+ does not seem to have been readily available.

Prices ranged from $606 to $609 for the slower of the three chips, to $910 to $919 for the mid-range part and around $1,135 for the 4800+. AMD's price-list has the three parts down as $537, $803 and $1,001, though that's OEM pricing, with buyers committing themselves to purchasing parts in batches of 1,000 chips.

The boxed product may be pricey, but that didn't stop shops selling all their stocks of the new AMD CPUs, local news sources claimed. However, this morning, a number of online retailers will listing all four X2 processors for immediate availability.

AMD formally launched the X2 at the end of May, with all available parts shipping to the computer manufacturers.

The X2 series is available in two flavours, one with 1MB of L2 cache and the other with 2MB, in each case split 50:50 between the two cores. The latter is the 'Toledo' chip, which has been on AMD's public roadmap for some time. The smaller-cache part is codenamed 'Manchester'.

Toledo and Manchester are offered at 2.2GHz and 2.4GHz, like the faster single-core Athlon 64s. Manchester's smaller cache means lower model numbers. At those clock frequencies, it's rated at 4200+ and 4600+ while Toledo comes in at 4400+ and 4800+.

AMD said the processors will boost the performance of "select" digital media and productivity software by up to 80 per cent over the company's single-core chips. On average, productivity performance goes up 22 per cent, compared to single-core Athlon 64s, while digital media apps run 34 per cent faster, the company claimed. ®

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