AMD roadmap drops Athlon XP

Greater focus on Sempron, 90nm

AMD has updated its public roadmap. The biggest change: the death of its Athlon XP brand.

AMD has fully committed itself to Sempron, and adds a couple of new 90nm processors to the line-up. Indeed, there's a clear shift toward 90nm over 130nm across the roadmap.

Previous roadmaps have continues to list Athlon XP parts running right out into H2 2005, albeit with the company's "as market requires" caveat. As far as the XP line goes, the market clearly doesn't require it, and AMD has dropped all references to the brand, even though the latest roadmap goes no further into the future than the previous one.

Instead, the roadmap shows a renewed focus on Sempron. Having shipped its 90nm Low Voltage Mobile Sempron, aka 'Sonora', it disappears from the H1 2005 column, to be replaced in H2 2005 by a new addition to the roadmap, 'Roma', simply described as a 90nm LV part.

In the same timeframe, AMD will offer 'Albany', a "90nm SOI" follow-up to H1 2005's already-listed 'Georgetown', itself the successor to today's 130nm Mobile Sempron. None of the new CPUs are listed as dual-core parts.

The 130nm Mobile Athlon 64 and 130nm desktop Semprons now extend only as far as the end of H1 2005, rather than right through H2 2005, and both now carry the 'as market requires tag'. That suggests AMD expects to deprecate these 130nm parts sooner rather than later.

Indeed, a DigiTimes report, citing Taiwanese mobo-maker sources, says AMD plans to migrate all production to 90nm early next year. If that's the case, we can effectively rewrite 'as market requires' to 'while stocks last'.

That seems true of the Athlon MP, which continues to be listed right through H2 2005 - and now the 130nm Opteron chips, too. Previous roadmaps had them being replaced by 90nm parts, but now it will exist in parallel, again presumably while AMD runs down its stocks of the CPUs.

It had better hurry and get the 90nm Opterons out of the door. According to the roadmap, these are still unreleased products. AMD now has little more than a month to ship them if it's to meet its promised H2 2004 release timeframe.

A new 90nm AMD Athlon 64 core is due H1 2005. Codenamed 'Venice' it will replace today's 90nm and 130nm Athlon 64 desktop chips. Again, it's not clear how this CPU differs from the 90nm 'Winchester' part that's currently shipping.

The new roadmap makes no reference to 'Pacifica' or 'Presidio', the two codenames AMD CFO Fred Weber recently referred to. ®

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