Affordable dual core AMD X2 on the way
 

IN MY home country, this time of year is considered to be a "season of sour pickles", just because in Mediterranean countries from Spain to Greece, everything comes to a business stand-still during late July and August.
However, at the same time - there are a lot of things going on behind the gates of just about every company out there that has something to do with the traditional Back to School, a certain time which takes place in August and can save your Q3 financials. If you miss it, expect some hefty marketing money to be spent afterwards - taken from R&D, of course - in order to get sales up for end of year and that Yule time.

For both Intel and AMD, it is a critical time of year, since most of the students just don’t have $500 to spend on a CPU or a graphics card. Luckily for a certain picklish-coloured company, its 6600 products are bound to disappear from the shelves faster than Fox’s CEO canned TV shows. Of course, AMD touts dual core CPU and you just can't sell the expensive stuff except to expensive brats, which don’t come in flocks. Intel made its move with a $250 dual core Pentium 4.

AMD's solution: El Cheapo Athlon X2 which will be a dual core CPU for a mere $345. Dubbed the Athlon 64 X2 3800+, it’s a typical X2 with 512 KB of L2 cache per core. Each core will continue to feature 128 KB of L1. The clock speed is lowered to 2.0 GHz which just isn’t much of a difference as the 4200+ is 2.2GHz with a 2x 512KB L2 part, so a logical conclusion would be a question asking AMD to jusify charge of $0.96 per megahertz when comparing 3800+ and 4200+.

We currently have zero information on the possible "missing link" in X2 offering, which goes by the name "4000+", but it could appear on the market as 2.0 GHz clocked CPU with two times 1MB of L2 cache. Possible low bin 4400 and 4800s.

We can’t wait to see the CPU and the first overclocking results, which should demystify the nature of this new beast. The ;aunch date is sooner than most of us might think.

http://theinquirer.net/?article=24440

we'll see how well el cheapo clocks

I would think they have been collecting bad clocking chips for that move while selling out the winchesters and newcastles around, which would be pretty smart.

Let's see what AMD is made of .... if the plant in Germany is really that good, the yield factor will be high.