AMD Athlon FX-53 to Emerge Before Year End?

by Anton Shilov
11/03/2003 | 06:58 PM

Since our yesterday’s report titled “AMD Athlon 64 3400+ to Come in December?” about an upcoming 64-bit desktop CPU we have heard a number of claims coming from various sources about the Athlon FX-53 release before the end of the year. The information is unconfirmed, but looks logical enough.

According to rumours, AMD plans to respond to Intel’s actual release of the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition with the launch of yet another AMD Athlon 64 FX chip with dual-channel memory controller clocked at massive 2.40GHz.

The new AMD Athlon FX-53 processor presumably destined to come out next month will be packed in 940-pin package and will require a couple of registered PC3200 DIMM modules to show its real power. At 2.40GHz, the K8 architecture featuring large caches, powerful FPU and ALU units, efficient pipeline and micro architectural optimisations as well as SSE2 technology support would allow the microprocessor to be the most powerful CPU in the desktop market this year.

The launch of such exciting CPU would generally boost AMD’s processor-based systems sales during the holiday season, I believe. The only question is whether AMD is in a position to launch this chip in commercial quantities, or will have to wait until next quarter.

AMD’s Athlon 64 and 64 FX microprocessors are produced in Fab 30 based in Dresden, Germany using a 0.13 micron fabrication process with Silicon-on-Insulator technology originally developed by IBM to boost semiconductors’ performance efficiency. Due to a very complex design, AMD’s Athlon 64-series chips are not that good in terms of overclocking. As a consequence, 2.40GHz clock-speed may not be achievable in commercial quantities of the chips.

“We do not comment on rumour or speculation, and we do not talk about unannounced products,” an AMD official said today.