90nm AMD Athlon 64 and Opteron to be available next month

As you know, 90nm AMD Athlon 64 and Opteron processors will go on production at the Dresden fab on the second week of April. However, according to The Register, systems on these CPUs will not be available until the late Q3 / early Q4.

The same was reported by Robert Rivet, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, at Morgan Stanley Semiconductor and Systems Conference. He also said that the volume production of the aforementioned products will be launched in July. This corresponds to company´s processor roadmap announced earlier. Thus AMD reserves a month to release enough processors to ship systems in September/October.

In Q2 AMD is to introduce two 90nm Athlon 64 modifications, Winchester (Athlon 64) and San Diego (Athlon 64-FX). Meanwhile Opteron will be modified into three models, Athens (800 series), Troy (200 series), and Venus (100 series). Rivet also said that the new Athlon 64 will have crystal smaller than 100mm² that is also smaller than that of 90nm Pentium 4 (112mm²), but Winchester will have twice smaller L2 cache that Prescott.

According to Rivet, by the year-end company´s 64-bit products shipments will outrun shipments of 32-bit processors. At the moment Athlon XP sales profits are higher than that of 64-bit chips, but the turning point is somewhere about Q4 2004.

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