Advanced Micro Devices, the No. 2 maker of x86 microprocessors in the world, plans to increase shipments of higher-end central processing units, particularly, the Athlon 64 FX models, in the second half of the year, according to figures from mainboard makers, which were published by a web-site.

During the first and second quarter of 2006 the chipmaker supplied 10 thousand of the AMD Athlon 64 FX processors into the market. In the third quarter the company is projected, according to numbers published by HKEPC web-site, to ship 15 thousand of its top-of-the-range chips, while in the fourth quarter the firm is expected to supply 20 thousand of the highest-speed chips.

Starting from the third quarter of the year AMD will ramp up production of Athlon 64, Athlon 64 X2 and Athlon 64 FX processors that serve mainstream, performance mainstream and high-end market segments, respectively. At the same time, the number of AMD Sempron processors to be shipped to the market will be reduced amid overall increase in microprocessor supplies.

According to the published figures, processors for the socket AM2 infrastructure will account for 52% of shipments in Q3 and nearly 84% in Q4 2006. If the information is correct, it means that the absolute majority of AMD64 microprocessors for desktops will migrate to new DDR2 memory and new socket by the end of the year.

Additionally, according to figures published, AMD will ship 50% more desktop microprocessors in Q4 compared to the shipments in Q2 2006, which may be associated with rapid ramp up of production at Fab 36.

Earlier it was reported that AMD plans to ship 46 million of desktop central processing units, 12 million microprocessors for notebooks and unknown quantity of server chips, accounting for over 25% of the world’s x86 microprocessors.

AMD did not comment on the news-story.