Shuttle Computer this week announced its new series of small form-factor PC barebones to support the recently announced AMD Athlon 64 chips for Socket 939 infrastructure. The introduction enables mini personal computers with extreme performance amid 64-bit capability provided by the latest breed of AMD64 central processing units.

Shuttle’s XPC SN95G5 for AMD’s Athlon 64 chips in PGA939 packaging is based on NVIDIA’s nForce3 Ultra chipsets supporting 1000MHz HyperTransport bus along with APG 8x, PCI 32-bit/33MHz, Serial ATA-150 and Parallel ATA-133 with RAID capabilities in addition to a number of other I/O features.

AMD Athlon 64 processors with 939 pins integrate 512KB of L2, only a half of the size incorporated into the previous 754-pin chips, but take advantage of the very efficient dual-channel memory controller that is likely to decrease the impact of cut-down cache and even improve performance of 939-pin chips over 754-pin processors with 1MB on-die secondary-level cache, which is why CPUs in different types of packaging does not have similar model numbers at equal clock-speeds. The AMD Athlon 64 FX parts will continue to have 1MB of L2 after the transition to Socket 939.

Given relatively low TDP – about 89W – of AMD’s Athlon 64 processors, Shuttle did not have use install a  power supply with higher performance or implement any additional fans, like on the latest line of XPC computers designed for Intel’s Pentium 4 processors in LGA packaging. As a result, the company’s SN95G5 barebone is still not only small, but also pretty quiet.

Shuttle did not elaborate on pricing and availability of the new product.