The brand that has been known for a little less than ten years – AMD Athlon – is expected to get yet another life with the revamped K10 micro-architecture by Advanced Micro Devices, once the new chips get launched in April 2009.

Sources with knowledge of AMD’s plans have indicated that the world’s second largest maker of chips plans to continue using the well-known AMD Athlon trademark to market processors known under code-names Propus, Rana and Regor and made using 45nm process technology. This will prolong the life of the brand and will also attract attention of those, who once knew Athlon and Athlon 64 chips as performance champions.

AMD Athlon X4 600-series (Propus) is a quad-core processor with dual-channel DDR2/DDR3 memory controller (depending on packaging) and 2MB L2 cache (512KB per core) , Athlon X3 400-series (Rana) is a triple-core central processing unit with DDR2/DDR3 memory controller (depending on packaging) and with 1.5MB L2 cache, whereas AMD Athlon X2 200-series (Regor) is a dual-core processor with 1MB L2 cache per core and DDR2/DDR3 support, depending on the packaging.

Quad-core and triple-core AMD Athlon X4 and Athlon X3 chips are projected to be released in April, 2009, whereas the Athlon X2 is expected to be released in June, 2009. All the chips are projected to run in the 2.70GHz – 2.80GHz range.

Given that AMD now uses the Athlon brand for inexpensive microprocessors, it is logical to assume that the new Athlon X4 or X3 chips will also be affordable.

As the information comes from unofficial sources, officials from AMD did not comment on the news-story.

Tags: AMD, Athlon, Propus, Heka, Regor, 45nm