The Athlon XP processor line was one of AMD’s greatest success stories. It’s been available to us in many different forms over the years, and the line certainly ended on a note that strongly indicated AMD’s intentions for future processor promotion and design. As you all know the chips are still readily available, but not for much longer. The Athlon XP officially dies Q2 next year. But who will look after the famous Socket A platform while it slowly winds down from its long and blissful career? The AMD Sempron of course.
Now onto the dirty details about the processor: Sempron won’t have 64-bit capabilities. Sempron won’t support No eXecute instructions. Sempron only has 256K of L2 cache, and Sempron runs at 62W. The processor will be primarily targeted at Socket A platforms, but will also show up on Socket 754 at launch. It appears some OEM channels will have Semprons for Socket 939 by this time next year as well. Obviously the memory controller will be integrated on the Socket 754 and Socket 939 versions of the processor. Although the Sempron will have twice the cache of a Duron, judging by the naming of the new processors the clock speed appears moderately low (particularly with such high power consumption requirements).
Source: AnandTech
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