AMD's Sempron CPU Line Still Alive and Kicking, Welcomes New Chip

Even though many of us believed that AMD's Sempron processor line is dead and buried, the Sunnyvale-based company has recently introduced a new SKU based on this core, which is already retailing in some low-end systems. This latest addition brought to the AMD's value CPU line is called the Sempron 130 and it features a single processing core clocked at 2.6GHz as well as just 512 KB of Level 2 cache memory. This makes it the slowest single-core Sempron processor in AMD's lineup.

Despite its low frequency and core count, the rest of the chip's features list is identical to that of other K10 parts and it includes virtualization support as well as the AMD64 instruction set.

From the information that is available at this time, it seems like the 130 is available in two versions, one carrying the C2 revision while the other is based on the C3 stepping.

According to CPU-World's findings, the newer C3 revision is based on the same Regor core that is used for the Athlon II X2 series, meaning there is a strong chance that the second, disabled, core can be activated.

In fact, the before-mentioned publication even managed to unlock the extra core of its Sempron 130 C3 sample to turn it into what the BIOS identifies as an "AMD Athlon(tm) II X2 4300e Processor."

Right now, the Sempron 130 is available in a series of inexpensive system sold in Latin America as well as on eBay, where its tray version is retailed for $29.99, or $8 cheaper than the boxed Sempron 140.

AMD introduced the Sempron brand in 2004 with a series of re-branded Athlon XP parts and had partially crippled features. Until now, AMD's budget chips used no less than three microarchitectures and were installed in countless entry-level systems.

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