AMD Opteron 140 Starring as AMD Athlon 64 FX-43

by Anton Shilov
10/27/2003 | 10:50 AM

Some Japanese stores are selling AMD Opteron 140 processors under AMD Athlon 64 FX-43, Akiba PC Hotline reports. There are no indications about any success, but the fact that retailers are advertising server and workstation processor under desktop brand may mean that they want to sell off the CPUs as soon as possible.

Clocked at 1.40GHz, AMD Opteron 140 processor has 1MB of L2 cache, dual-channel memory controller and has no architecture differences with AMD Athlon 64 FX-51 processor clocked at 2.20GHz. Performance of this chip is hardly sufficient for gaming applications, but some hardware enthusiasts may want to acquire such processor in order to upgrade to a Socket 940 platform and get an AMD Athlon 64 FX-51 processor eventually.

The value of AMD Opteron 140 chip in Japan is roughly $220, while the price of the AMD Athlon FX-51 approaches $920 point. Even though there is a significant gap in CPU pricing, Socket 940 mainboards and registered DDR SDRAM memory modules also cost quite a lot of money and we cannot expect Socket 940 systems to be cost-effective.

Selling server and workstation chips into the desktop market may also mean that there are not enough customers demanding the Opteron 140 chips.