AMD Sempron. AMD answered to the launch of the Celeron D family by releasing its own series of value CPUs called Sempron. Unlike Intel, AMD’s engineers didn’t introduce any changes into the characteristics of the processor cores they had at their disposal. The Sempron is in fact a renamed Athlon XP, which became very cheap after the arrival of the Athlon 64 CPU series. Semprons with ratings up to 2800+ are Socket A CPUs on old 0.13-micron Thoroughbred-B and Thorton cores with 333MHz FSB, up to 2GHz clock rates, and 256KB of L2 cache. The Sempron 3000+ is a Barton-core processor with 2GHz frequency, 333MHz FSB, and 512KB L2 cache.

The Sempron family for Socket A systems should oust the Athlon XP processor out of the market: this is an indication of the fact that the time of Socket A processors is over, and they can only serve in low-end computers now.

The Sempron family also includes a Socket 754 model (with 3100+ rating). The Sempron 3100+ differs a lot from its junior mates. It is based on the Paris core, sharing the same K8 architecture with top-end CPUs on ClawHammer and NewCastle cores. However, there’s little left of the power of the top-end models: the Paris core has only 256KB of L2 cache and has the AMD64 technology disabled. In other words, the Sempron 3100+ is a 32-bit processor, in spite of its links to the Athlon 64 family. On the other hand, the Sempron 3100+, just like the Athlon 64, supports Cool’n’Quiet technology, SSE2 instruction set, and can use the NX bit.

The Sempron is a new series of value CPUs from AMD, which is going to develop and extend further. It is clear that we’ll see other Sempron models for Socket 754 and Socket 939 systems soon.