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AMD Announces New Low-End Processor Line
beaverbrother points out these articles at CoolTechZone
and PC Magazine, writing "AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) is slated to launch a new Sempron line of processors this summer, to compete with Intel's Celeron line. The processors are designed to perform basic tasks, such as word processing, and more advanced tasks, like playing video, with ease."
Via already makes a line of small integrated motherboards with most of those requirements, called EPIA. They use their own Eden processor. It's pretty gutless, but it would make a fine file server or I/O device.
Absolutely sure -- semPron is Portuguese/Spanish -- 'sem' means 'without'
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"Well, system halting is good, but or produce error noice? If the heatsink has fallen completely off you've hardly started to hear that error beep when the CPU core has already permanently damaged.
It'd be really interesting to know, what option applies in which case."
I improperly installed the CPU cooler in a Shuttle SFF Athlon system (with an NForce2 chipset), and it refused to boot and blinked the "CPU" LED on the motherboard. No damage was done to the CPU, after removing the (defective) shim the CPU worked fine.
The whole "thermal death" issue was really a farse. Since Athlon XP, there has been a thermal diode in the CPU. Implementing the $.25 circuit which monitors the diode and cuts the power was left to the motherboard manufacturer. Unfortunately, most manufacturers left the circuit off to save money. Fortunately, every modern board has thermal protection.
Not to mention the fact that, with a properly installed heatsink (remember, 95% of the people with Athlon systems got them professionally assembled and tested by an OEM), the Athlon should *never* have such a problem. Trust me, it takes a lot more than a sudden shock to unseat the heatsink.
"Given that, unlike AMD processors, Intel CPUs have a thermal regulator in them, I dont get the joke. I've seen Athlon chips barf their guts out across a motherboard when the heatsink fell off (plastic clip broke off in a tower), but a Celeron should just crash in that case or a P4 will just reduce its clock speed. In fact even the newer 64 bit AMD chips lack a thermal cut out on the chip, but at least (at LONG last) they have it on the motherboard."
Sorry, you're wrong.
All AMD CPUs since the Palomino (Athlon XP) have had a thermal diode *embedded in the CPU*. This includes the Athlon 64.
Early Athlon XP boards lacked the functionality to cut power.
"I just wish that AMD would spend more time on things like this and clock locking rather then pushing for higher speeds."
Why? ALL modern AMD boards have the proper functionality and will shut down when the thermal solution fails. Why should they focus on fixing something which hasn't been broken since 2002?
You do realize that the sempron will be a regular athlon64 with features disabled? I.E. some of the L2 cache or the "64-bitness".
Duron is being phased out, to be replaced by Sempron. AMD will thus still only have two consumer CPU names, Athlon64/Sempron.