AMD launches Socket 939 Athlon 64 processors

Sunnyvale (CA) - AMD today introduced at Computex its first Socket 939 processors: The Athlon 64 3500+ and 3800+ as well as a version of the Athlon 64 FX-53. The company also launched the Athlon 64 3700+ as final step of the Socket 754.

The 3500+ and 3800+ are clocked at 2.2 GHz and 2.4 GHz and carry 512 kByte of L2 cache, compared to 1 MByte of the 754-pin package processors. Socket 939 chips however benefit from Hypertransport up to 1 GHz and a dual-channel memory controller and are supposed to compensate the decrease in L2 memory. The FX-53 processor, clocked at 2.4 GHz, continues to ship with 1 MByte L2 cache.

The Athlon 64 3700+ is likely the final processor for the Socket 754. The processor is clocked at 2.4 GHz.

As previous Opteron and Athlon 64 models, all four new chips offer "no execute" technology (NX), which AMD calls Enhanced Virus Protection (EVP). NX is designed to protect the system against buffer overflow attacks. Buffer overflow attacks flood the computer's buffer memory before targeting it with malicious code which then can be executed by the processor. According to AMD, NX is able to detect such attacks and will be supported ob computers with Windows XP SP2 installed.

AMD said that all four new processors are available worldwide immediately. Priced in 1,000-unit quantities, the Athlon 64 FX-53 processor is available for $799. The Athlon 64 processor models 3800+, 3700+ and 3500+ are priced at $720, $710 and $500, respectively.

Users who rather buy processors one-by-one were able to order the processors since Saturday at various websites. For example computers4sure.com offered the 3500+ chip for $581 and the 3800+ model for $830.

Get more details about AMD's Socket 939 processors here.