AMD going to discontinue Phenom II and Athlon II?

I'm sure Father Xmas and Hyperstrike have heard this...

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd...zer,14173.html

Looks like the only Phenom IIs coming to the market are the 960T (reject x6 supply) its for sale at the 'egg for $124.99. Looks like the 1090T is sold out and probably not going to come back

Sigh, baby out with the bathwater for AMD...First a disappointing chip with Bulldozer and now killing off their venerable but still decent (for low end) Athlon II and Phenom II line. Probably getting rid of them because they compete too well with the Bulldozer and Llano chips.

Well, AMD have bet the kids' college fund on their new architecture. If they don't push it and deprecate their old stuff, it's money wasted.

Granted, the platform was money wasted anyhow, but still.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Thanks a lot for the answer, Hyper, I had the feeling you could enlighten me in a simpler way than me reading the tech sites, although I'd surely do my research in case you said the chips were fine for a gaming laptop. Glad you mentioned they're power hungry since I'm thinking about a laptop.

As for Mac OS X, it's an OS I really like, and yes I paid a premium price because not much reason to get a mac if you're not into OS X. And anyway since I really wanted the 27 inch iMac I'd have spent half the price of the computer on a 27 inch monitor.

But I'm probably sicker than you from the Apple fanboys around me, especially since Brazil has been rising economically and Apple has been all the rage here lately. I see the appeal of Mac OS X of course, but tbh most of the recently converted Apple using friends I have complain about viruses and freezing and etc, a problem I never had on windows (although I never used Me or Vista) - and on my previous mac I ran XP for months without going to OS X because of CoX and never had problems, despite disliking XP's interface (I like 7 a lot tho).

But if I were a serious gamer I'd have bought a PC because while I'm enjoying that for now I can run Skyrim at almost max settings for example (I can do max if I drop to 1920x1080 but at the native res from my display I have to tone down some things but it looks better in native anyway), I know it won't last long due to not being able to replace the GPU, and besides CoX it's the only PC game that has gotten me hooked for a long time - and for gaming the conversions are sucky sometimes because of those emulation shenanigans I don't understand well, I use the windows client on CoX because I can play on max 'everything' for 12 hours straight if I want, the mac client crashes about once per hour no matter what I do, I bet you checked out the flood of complaints in the mac forums here.

Well in AMD's case its a supply problem on the 32nm parts and the shaky relationship with Glofo.

The Llano and Brazos chips are actually decent (for their market segment) its really the bulldozer chips that didn't deliver.

This decision was made over a year ago, before even the Fusion Socket FM1 APUs came to market. It was one of the reasons my low end build switched to Intel.

AMD does sort of but not really have a "new" Athlon II quad core for Socket FM1 which is an A8 APU with the graphics disabled. Got to sell all these "broken" APUs somehow.

So going forward right now AMD has two CPU lines. The Fusion combo CPU/GPU line (the desktop chip fits in a FM1 socket) which isn't bad from the point of view of store bought PCs and laptops that don't have a discrete video card. The desktop A8-3800/3850 is essentially a tweaked Athlon II quad core coupled with an underclocked HD 5570. It's a damn sight better than the IGPs they had in chipsets that supported socket AM3/AM3+ and for a really cheap gaming PC that you could sneak by Mom and Dad when you go off to college.

The second line is the Bulldozer based CPUs. While they may have similar price/performance as Intel's Sandy Bridge in a few heavily multithreaded tasks, it sucks power more than that invisible energy monster from the original Jonny Quest. Now AMD doesn't have the fabrication R+D that Intel has when it comes to finding clever ways to keep power consumption down and then patent the heck out of it. AMD's CPUs and support chipsets were always a bit more power hungry, which wasn't a problem back in the Intel P4 days but AMD haven't really made any improvements since then.

Sometime in the near future AMD will swap out the Athlon II based CPU design from their high end Fusion APU line for one based on the Bulldozer. Hopefully this would be an improved version of the Bulldozer but I'm not all that excited by it. In the near future Intel will release their Ivy Bridge CPUs which will be faster than their Sandy Bridge line and will have significantly improved integrated graphics, possibly enough to displace AMD's Fusion desktop solution.

We'll see.