There are three weeks before AMD Opteron will show up at last and there are still a lot of Socket A mainboards for the present-generation Athlon MP processors. Given that the yield of the higher-end Athlon XP/MP “Thoroughbred” chips has improved substantially for the last three months (we point it out over here), Advanced Micro Devices may soon launch another Socket A CPU intended for 2-way servers and workstations.

TYAN company recently started to offer new beta BIOSes for its mainboards with added support for Athlon MP 2800+ processors, as I learnt over here. After some time TYAN replaced the brand-name “Athlon MP 2800+” with more neutral “Adds support for new Athlon MP CPUs”, but basically it does not change a lot: we still understand that AMD will launch even faster version (or versions) of its current chips for 2-way PCs.

It is not clear whether the upcoming Athlon MP processor is based on the Barton or Thoroughbred core, since the latter would be clocked higher than 2250MHz, while the former would hit something like a bit more than 2083MHz. Note that since AMD 760-MPX chipsets support only 266MHz FSB, the parts should be clocked higher than desktop brethren with 333MHz FSB.

The prices on AMD Opteron processors will be much higher than the costs of the Athlon MP (see this news-story); as a result, AMD will not necessary slash the prices on the current line of server and workstation microprocessors since Opteron sales will hardly affect this market segment much. Note that everything may change in the last few days and there will a different situation when we see affordable x86-64 Opteron processors and really inexpensive Athlon MP CPUs.