Representatives for Advanced Micro Devices and HardWare.fr revealed Thursday that the information about changes in AMD’s model number approach with its Athlon 64 processors published on the 31^st of March is not correct.

On Wednesday a France-based hardware web-site posted a story citing a fake document from AMD saying that the company was going to adopt model numbers that resemble those that were going to be used by its rival Intel Corporation. The information appeared to be an April Fool’s Day joke, even though it was posted on the 31^st of March, 2004, said Marc Prieur, an Editor-in-Chief for HardWare.fr. 

“AMD’s model numbers are developed to convey relative application performance among a family of AMD processors.  For example, with each desktop product, we test for business productivity, digital content creation and gaming performance with an end goal to assign a model number that makes the purchasing decision easier for a consumer or the IT professional.  Do not expect that to change any time soon,” an AMD spokesman said on Thursday to X-bit labs.

“AMD Athlon 64 processors are identified by a 4 digit model number. AMD model numbers, based on industry-standard benchmarks on a wide range of popular software, are a simple, accurate representation of relative AMD processor performance.

The model number methodology is designed to help end users simplify their PC purchase decision. The higher the model number, the better the overall software performance on the processor,” the company says.

AMD uses similar pattern to mark its Athlon XP, Athlon XP-M, Mobile Athlon 64 and DTR Athlon 64 processors. AMD Opteron processors for servers are marked with three digit model number, where the first digit represents the maximum number of processors supported by target system of the particular chip, the other two digits indicate relative performance within the series.