The fact that AMD has lost the CPU race at this moment seems to be modeling the behavior of the company at least when regarding the official launches. That’s actually quite understandable, especially if you keep in mind the fact that K8 design is quite outdated at the moment. However, that doesn’t imply that AMD will abandon its AM2 line.

The 2 new CPUs come in 5400+ and 5600+ variants but have the same 2.8GHz clock speed. AMD is going for the Sempron numbers here (same clock, different cache). The amount of L2 cache per core is the following: 5400+ comes with 512KB of L2 cache per core (total: 1MB) while its older brother 5600+ comes with 1MB of L2 cache per core (total: 2MB) giving it equal specs to high-end the Athlon 64 FX-62 CPU. The same specs also apply to the newly introduced FX-72 (socket 1207).

The fixed price tag of 5400+ and 5600+ (in 1000 units shipments) is $485 and $505 respectively, filling quite a large gap between the 5200+ (currently $403) and the expensive FX-62 ($713). And I guess that’s not all since FX-62 will also have to drop some weight in order to remain competitive against its equal 5600+ brother.

There is no information regarding the manufacturing process, but it seems that for now the CPUs will be manufactured under 90nm process (with SOI enhancements evidently). A new series of the same CPUs will enter the market in the 1st quarter of 2007 being manufactured under the 65nm process. AMD also wants to speed up the introduction of its new high-end X2 CPUs with AMD is also readying the 5800+ and 6000+ CPU lines.

After all, AMD will launch some competitive CPUs. 5800+ and 6000+ should feature a more bombastic launch with press releases and reviews. The Athlon 64 X2 5800+ will work at 3GHz with 512KB of L2 cache per core, while the 6000+ will have the same clock speed but this time it will carry 1MB of L2 cache per core. The CPUs will use the same AM2 socket and will be aimed at their high-end INTEL counterparts.