We discovered a few mentions of the Athlon 64 3000+ and Athlon 64 3200+ processors for Socket AM2 in the price-lists of some distributors about 10 days before the official platform launch. The day before yesterday it became clear that these processors are not in AMD’s official price-list. Moreover, the Socket 939 Athlon 64 3200+, the price of which has recently dropped from $158 to $138, disappeared from the price-list proving the fact that this model has been discontinued.

We were really interested to find out what really happened to Athlon 64 3200+ and Athlon 64 3000+ processors for Socket AM2 and we addressed our questions to AMD representatives. As we found out, Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz) and Athlon 64 3000+ (1.8GHz) designed for Socket AM2 platform do exist. They feature 512KB L2 cache and support DDR2-667 dual-channel memory. They should be selling at the same price as their Socket 939 counterparts. In fact, Athlon 64 3200+ is assigned the price of $138, while the approximate price of Athlon 64 3000+ lies between $109 and $115.

At the same time these two processors are targeted for slightly different fields. If Athlon 64 3200+ (Socket AM2) is officially shipping to all markets where this model is demanded, then the Athlon 64 3000+ (Socket AM2) should sell only in the emerging markets. Of course, it implies China, India, Russia and Latin America, although the actual geography of these CPUs is quite washed out. The users can order boxed Athlon 64 3000+ for Socket AM2 in Germany, USA and Canada. The Germans will have to pay 103 Euros for it, for American users it will cost $126. And I really doubt that these markets can also be considered emerging and developing.

Thanks to the relatively low price of only $115, Athlon 64 3000+ processor for Socket AM2 could be a great choice for overclocking. However, we cannot check yet if AMD uses the new core revisions for the single-core Socket AM2 processors or the old ones that don’t support DDR2-800 memory. These cores can also have limited frequency potential, which is unacceptable for further overclocking experiments.